


Intercostal

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Humor, M/M, Romance, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-07 03:14:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17357870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Roy isn't aliar– he's a storyteller, and a good one.  Admittedly, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.  Sometimes, omission is the better part of valor, and embellishment is all he's got.(a.k.a. yet another "And they were SOULMATES!" "…ohmyGod, they weresoulmates.")





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> At long last (because I am a #disaster), an FMA Secret Santa gift for [little wendigo boy](https://little-wendigo-boy.tumblr.com/)!! \o/ He wanted a soulmate fic, so THAT'S WHAT WE'VE GOT. :D Happy holidays!! (And sorry for the wait! As you can tell, it… got away from me. :'| ) More to come this weekend, if not before!
> 
> Huge, huge shout-out thank-you to [dragonimp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonimp) for suggesting the soulmate AU! ♥ …but I'm not going to tell you what it is, because I'm hoping it'll be more fun if you guys get to discover it with these poor nerds. ;)  
>   
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> **in·ter·cos·tal** [/ˌin(t)ərˈkästəl/]  
>  _adjective_  
>  1\. situated between the ribs.  
> 
> 
> * * *

It starts with a twinge and ends with General Roy Mustang, decorated officer of the Amestriam military, undisputed pillar of dignity, lying on the floor fighting for the wherewithal to wheeze.

Well— _really_ it starts earlier than that, and much more quietly, but Roy’s learned over the years that sometimes people stop listening halfway through if you don’t start the story off with something of impact.  Roy has also learned that sometimes you have to make up the whole story from beginning to end.

It would make for a poor story, for instance, to start with _I was complaining idly about shoulder pain, and my best friend and primary source of solace said “Perhaps you’re just getting old, sir”; and the short streak of vicious lightning still illuminating my wretched life at unheralded intervals said “Better not try to get workman’s comp, ’cause nobody in their right mind’d believe that you spend enough time at your desk for it to happen that way” and then walked out of the room._

It would make an even poorer story to begin with _I never even dreamed that he would come back to this den of wolves, let alone to the pack I attempt to lead around it, let alone willingly; and it was only after he had that I realized how much it meant, and how much it mattered, and I started to_ miss _him every time he wasn’t there_.

Roy is a connoisseur, after all, of regret.  He is no stranger to missing things: no stranger to wistfulness, to wondering, to wishing fervently and feeling weak.  He misses everyone he’s ever lost, and everyone he’s taken away.  He misses the days when he felt like the world was new, and vast, and unexplored, instead of endless and unfriendly.  He misses the days when his curiosity, not a sense of looming dread, was what drew him to discoveries, and when what he learned was a reward instead of an ever-unfolding well of worseness.  He misses burning the midnight oil because he _wanted_ to, rather than because he has to hide his intellect in order to survive; he misses the days when burning anything didn’t send a rolling curl of frigid anguish up and down his spine.  He misses youth.  He misses innocence.  He misses looking forward to the rest of his life.

And he misses every single one of his exes, although one of them merits an order of magnitude more than any of the rest.  Love, then—he misses that, too, if he ever really had it at all.  Maybe he misses the shadow of it.  Maybe he misses what he thought it was, and what it could have been, if he hadn’t tried to close his hands around it and watched it dwindle down and disappear into the night.

That’s the worst story yet.  They should _pay_ him for this sort of thing.  He should take up writing dime-store novels; he’ll make a fortune, and he can give it all away, and then his conscience might cede him a couple hours of sleep.

The long and short of it is that, on this particular evening, he’s barely even started complaining about the tingling feelings he keeps getting up and down his right arm—particularly in the fingers, which is clearly a sign that he’s strained something and needs to take a break from signing forms—when an incomprehensible quantity of concentrated agony strikes him in the center of the chest and fells him where he stands.

In the first instant, the shock overwhelms him so entirely that he doesn’t even feel it.

In the second instant, however, he sure as hell does—so acutely that the darkness at the edges of his vision winches inward, and so abruptly that it almost swallows him before he surfaces.

Stars blink and shimmer honey-bright and jet-black in front of his vision, followed by a rather worrying foggy swathe of white, but then everything clears in time for him to focus on Riza crouched down beside him, reaching for his shoulder.

“Roy?” she says.

It occurs to him that she is crouching because he is on the floor.  It also occurs to him that he’s been tracking mud all over this carpet all day, and now he’s pressing his face against it.  How positively unbecoming.

“Ow,” he says.

That’s not much better.

“What happened?” she asks.  “What is it?”

Someone who doesn’t know her quite as well as he does might expect her not to believe him.  Someone who doesn’t know him quite as well as she does might not realize that he’s not a good enough actor to replicate a fall like that.

He also wouldn’t have landed on his face.  Not _ever_.

“I have no idea,” he says.  He tries, through the whirl of _This isn’t possible, isn’t possible, can’t be right, can’t be real_ twirling through his cranium, to take stock of the specifics of the sensations that have left him sprawled out on his office floor.  Breathing hurts like _hell_ , which is more than a bit inconvenient given the necessity of that particular activity.  “I think… do you remember that time when I was sixteen, and I fell off of your father’s roof and broke three ribs?”

She stares at him.  “You were—standing.  You were just standing there.”

“I was working,” he says.  “Avidly.”

She gives him a look.

He was _thinking_ avidly about work—which, in this business, in his position, is every bit as important as the paperwork a lot of the time, but given that speaking also hurts, he’ll have to save that defense for a time that he’s feeling less like a winded ragdoll that’s been run down by a truck.

The upshot is that she’s the only one who bore witness to this feat of inexplicable agony: his team’s attention spans gradually degrade as the week progresses, at a rate consistent enough that he’s made progress on calculating the attention half-life of each of his officers.  On a Thursday night past six, their interests in their livelihoods have long since waned, and even Falman straggled out and homeward half an hour ago.  It’s just him, and Riza, and the utterly bizarre phenomenon at hand.

“Anything in the spine?” Riza asks.  “Can you get up?”

Roy takes the two hands she offers, even though raising his arms also hurts.  “Let’s find out.”

As it turns out, he _can_ get up.

As it turns out, any motion that requires rotation, contortion, or aggravation of his torso sets his entire body aflame.

“I’ll bet you two thousand cens it’s a broken rib,” he says—gasps, really, but he’s trying his best not to notice that part.

“No,” Riza says.  She doesn’t specify which part is disagreeable, so most likely it’s everything, possibly including his entire existence.  “Come on.  Will Knox be at home?”

Roy attempts not to lean on her too much, and also not to move his upper body in the slightest in the process of walking.  Neither is particularly successful.  “Where else would he be?”

“Hiding from us,” Riza says.

“Park down the street,” Roy says.  “If he can’t see the car, he won’t have time to run.”

“Brilliant,” Riza says.  “You seem to be enjoying walking so much that I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to do as much of it as possible.  Perhaps a mile away will be enough.”

“Good point,” Roy says.  “If he tries to make a break for it, you’ll have to give chase.”

“Doesn’t it hurt when you talk?” Riza asks.

“Yes,” Roy says.  “But I’m sure it hurts you even more.”

Getting a laugh out of Riza Hawkeye is not inconsequential, which brings Roy’s tally to two implausible things achieved tonight.

  


* * *

  


“Good news is,” Knox says, sitting back and gesturing in a manner so vague that it would not connote anything like _You can sit up now_ if it wasn’t for the wonder of context clues, “it’s not broken.”

Sitting up is agony.  Presumably that was Knox’s intention all along, since grimacing his way through it distracts Roy from saying anything more brilliant than, “What’s the bad news?”

“It’s definitely cracked,” Knox says.  “Which there’s nothing we can do about.  And your two options are to keep breathing really deeply until it heals—which is going to continue to hurt like the Devil tap-dancing on your ribcage—or to wind up with pneumonia.”

“I pick pneumonia,” Roy says.  “Definitely.  Much more fun.”

He can _feel_ Riza slowly raising her eyes from her report to give him a look.

“Fine by me,” Knox says as Roy does up his shirt—which also hurts.  This is going to get very old very fast, isn’t it?  “Enjoy.  Fuck you, by the way.”

Roy pauses.  He hadn’t realized that shirt buttons were quite so controversial.  “What did I do this time?”

Knox gestures at him, every bit as vaguely as the first time.  “Stay in shape even though you sit at a desk all damn day long.  It’s criminal.”

“Procrastinating burns calories,” Roy says.  It’s much pithier and much less boring than the truth, and it garners him another glare from Riza for good measure.

“You’re a genetic miracle,” Knox says.  “Enjoy that, too.”  Roy attempts to enjoy sliding to the edge of the cot-examination-table-item he’s been inhabiting, which—shockingly— _also_ summons a cascade of spears of pain.  “You want to tell me how this happened?”

“No,” Roy says.

Knox raises an eyebrow in a remarkably meaningful way.

“It’s really not a good story,” Roy says.

Knox raises the other eyebrow, which doubles the meaning.  He is, not so incidentally, standing in between Roy and the door.  “Try me.”

Roy heaves as deep a sigh as he can bear given how much it hurts.  “All right, it…” At risk of damaging a lung, he sighs again.  This narrative he intends to sell.  “We were leaving the office, and I was telling Lieutenant Hawkeye about all of the nonsense that happened in one of the morning meetings, and I was making some gestures— _very_ tactful and understated ones, mind you—and I was… not exactly watching my feet, or the hallway, or anything ahead.  The Lieutenant was reading through the report that we’d just finished, which we were planning to hand in on the way out, so I may have made some… slightly less understated gestures to get her attention, and I was focusing on that, and… at that point, we both assumed that the other was looking where I was going, and… there was… a sudden encounter with a stairway railing.”

Both of Knox’s eyebrows have lowered, which makes for an expression that incorporates more elements of a scowl than Roy would like.

Then he snickers.

“You have to be careful with those railings,” Knox says, winding up the tail of his stethoscope.  “They sneak up on you when you least expect it.”

“So I’ve noticed,” Roy says.  He eases himself the last inch to the edge of the cot and gingerly puts his weight on his feet.  It is truly revelatory just how many varieties of motion require one’s torso, and are consequently tantamount to torture tonight.  “I suppose we’d better get out of your hair.”

“What of it there is,” Knox says.  “Take care, Roy.  You, too, Lieutenant.”

Roy chooses not to think too much about what it might mean that he doesn’t merit an iteration of his office, and Riza does.  “Goodnight,” he says instead, and Riza leads the way to the door, and that’s… that.

For a grand total of thirty seconds, at least, as that’s approximately how long it takes them to get out of earshot.

“Would you care to share why you didn’t tell him the truth?” Riza asks.

“I’m already in a more than sufficient quantity of pain,” Roy says.  “I didn’t think it prudent to tell the single most ruthlessly pragmatic person who’s ever menaced me with a scalpel something along the lines of ‘I cracked a rib apropos of absolutely nothing’.”

Riza’s quiet for a moment before she says, “I suppose that’s fair.”  Then she’s quiet for another moment before she says, “Has Ed never menaced you with a scalpel?”

“Only the letter opener,” Roy says.  “And I’m close to eighty percent confident that he was just looking for a visual aide and didn’t realize that it was sharp, so he had no idea how threatening it was.”

“Interesting,” she says.

He has no idea what that means, and after the evening he’s had, he doesn’t feel brave and/or self-flagellating enough to ask.

They’ve staggered their way—well, Roy has staggered his way; Riza is walking normally, albeit slowly, beside him—back to the car.  Instead of unlocking it, she turns to him.

“What if it’s part of something bigger?” she asks.  “Or something worse?”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” he says.

“You are a piece of work, sir,” she says, but he can tell that she’s trying not to smile.

“Artwork,” he says.  “A celebrated masterpiece.”

“Yes, sir,” she says, and now she’s _definitely_ smiling.

  


* * *

  


The timing is… poor, to say the least: winter is miserable enough without some indefatigable chest pain.  Ever since Hughes died, this sort of weather has sought him out and pinned him down like a vengeful demon—seeping into his bones, slipping into his veins, swimming inside him until he’s cold straight through, like a backwards premonition of the creature he could have become.

He knows it was cold before—he remembers that, clearly enough.  But it wasn’t cold like _this_.  It wasn’t the kind of cold that cut through him and swelled in him until the abstract thought of summer makes his heart feel weak.

The whole team always holes up together at their local pub on Friday nights, the better to moan about the trials of the week and indulge a slightly obscene abundance of the place’s signature cheesy fries.  Roy imagines they’d melt the cheese longer than normal and serve his extra hot if he requested it special, but somehow he knows that that won't help.  This is a different sort of cold.  It’s deeper.

It’s probably a good thing Ed won’t be back from the latest mission until Monday.  Tonight, on the heels of yesterday’s rather sleepless evening, Roy got a call several minutes after five—and picked up, only to be informed by the switchboard operator’s smooth voice that the originator was the very errant alchemist he’d been thinking of.

He was greeted by silence, however, when he answered the call with, “Pray tell how I may be of assistance, Major Elric.”

“You’re still here?” Ed asked after a series of seconds long enough that Roy had begun to wonder if the line had dropped.  “Shit.  I mean—obviously.  Don’t answer that.  Shut up.”

“There were a few things I wanted to finish,” Roy said, which was, for once, the truth.  He had had to walk very sedately to all of his meetings today to avoid aggravating the rib, and it set him back a bit.  “I’m meeting the others in a few minutes.  I can only dare to hope that Lieutenant Havoc will keep my seat warm.  Everything all right?”

Ed was silent for a few more seconds.

“Yeah,” he said, slowly.  “Why?  Do you expect something to be wrong?”

“Ed,” Roy said, “I _always_ expect something to be wrong.  It’s the reason I’m still alive.  You get extra points for fulfilling my fears often enough that they no longer qualify as paranoia.  Thank you for that, by the way.”

“Whatever,” Ed said.  “Everything’s fine.”

“Good,” Roy said.  “Just don’t think this counts as your report.”

“Can’t hear you,” Ed said, every bit as clearly and calmly as the moment before.  “Line’s breaking up.”

“Lying to your superior officer is insubordination,” Roy said, as if either of them was anything less than infinitely familiar with the bounds of the term.  “It’s also rather rude.”

“So’s leaving me out of pub night just because I’m a hundred miles away,” Ed said.  “See if I ever buy you a second order of cheesy fries ever again.”

“Blackmailing your superior officer with threats to withhold cheesy fries is also insubordination,” Roy said.

“It is _not_ ,” Ed said.

“I’ll look it up,” Roy said.  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Is your hearing going?” Ed asked.  “I said I was, and I am, and it’s fine.”

“The repetition really sells it,” Roy said.  “Almost as well as the way you get more irritated the more I ask.”

“You’re the _worst_ ,” Ed said.  “I’m fine.  Everything’s fine.  Just—go have your damn cheesy fries and leave me alone.”

“As you like,” Roy said.  “I’ll have a few more than usual in your honor.”

“Better make it a whole basket,” Ed said.  “Good luck.  Hope you live, I guess.”

“Thank you,” Roy said.  “Travel safe, Major.”

“Quit calling me that,” Ed said, and immediately hung up the phone, which wasn’t even a surprise.

It’s good that he’s not here—not because Roy has an excuse to eat more cheesy fries, although that’s certainly a perilous side benefit.

It’s good because he always finds his way over to Roy’s side of the table and starts elbowing and commentating and making up odd little stories to explain the idiosyncrasies of the people sitting at the bar.  It’s good because he always insinuates himself between Roy and Roy’s histrionic tendencies and makes Roy laugh against his will instead of leaving him to wallow.  Roy has always been top-notch at wallowing.  It’s really a bit of a shame to have his talents so regularly disrupted.  Evidently Ed just has such a deep and fundamental aversion to weltering in self-pity that he can’t bear to witness it in others, and he feels compelled to battle it at every turn.  On an ordinary Friday night, Roy appreciates that more than he can quite put into words.

Tonight, then, for the first time in a long time, he’s grateful for Ed’s absence instead: tonight, laughing would _hurt_.

But it’s every bit as much a danger as a relief, isn’t it?  Left to its own devices, Roy’s mind is a pit of snakes, writhing and rife with venom, seething around itself.  This, too, is an ouroboros, built into the structure of his soul.  The wretchedness feeds itself by way of its own consumption, cycles endlessly, expands—

Every member of this team would lay their lives down for him.  Most of them came close.  And then all of them came back.

No man alive deserves that.  Roy Mustang is the _last_ pathetic creature that should claim such loyalty—such feats of faith; such impossible heights of human decency; all of them should _run_ before he drags them deep into the mire or cuts their throats with his own two hands.

“Hey, sir,” Fuery says.  He struggles to set the tray bearing the latest round of drinks down flat on the table, slides onto the booth bench seat next to Breda, and holds a slip of paper out across the table to Roy.  “The pretty brunette at the bar wanted to give you her number.”

Roy doesn’t glance over—there’s really no way to do it that isn’t self-aggrandizing, dismissive, or some nasty combination of the two.  Offhand rejection is difficult enough without the rejector deliberately grinding salt into any and all exposed areas of the wound.  In addition, Riza is still over there waiting for their fries, and if he hurts anyone’s feelings tonight, she’ll eat his share to punish him.  “Tell her I’m very sorry, but I’ve just started dating someone, and you’re available any night of the week.”

“First of all,” Fuery says, “I’m not, because I have to get a bunch of data for that power grid thing on Wednesday night—” Roy does not mention that he has no idea what the ‘power grid thing’ is, especially since he’s probably the one who asked for it.  “—and second… _General_.  Really?”

“What?” Roy says.  “You’re an extremely eligible bachelor.  You’re a catch.  Anyone would be lucky to have you.”

The look Fuery gives him is so deadpan that it should honestly be photographed and framed.

“Scoot,” Riza says from the edge of the table, and then she’s bumping his elbow with her hip to punctuate the command, since apparently he didn’t move over fast enough.  She sits down, sets a basket of cheesy fries in front of him, takes two out of it despite having an entire basket of her own, and then eats them.

“Good timing,” Roy says.  “You’ve just helped me sell my excuse without having to bribe Kain to go back over there.”

Riza wrinkles her nose.  “Am I your fake date again?”

“You say that like it isn’t one of the world’s greatest honors,” Roy says.

Riza looks him in the eyes, reaches over to his basket, and takes two more of his fries.

“Ah,” Roy says.

“Question,” Havoc says.  “Why aren’t you guys real-dating?”

“We can’t,” Riza says.

Falman tilts his head.  “The fraternization laws do have a few exce—”

“Not because I report to him,” Riza says, licking her fingers.  “Because he doesn’t put out enough.”

So much for not laughing.

  


* * *

  


Among the increasing number of signs that his age is starting to catch up with him: when he steps into his office Monday morning, flicks on the lights, and discovers Ed already sprawled out on the couch, it is no longer a humorous exaggeration to say that he veers _extremely_ close to the edge of cardiac arrest.

Holding a hand over his heart barely aggravates the rib.  At least his life’s single most inexplicable injury has left him his melodrama.

He’d come in early on purpose to scrounge up a few minutes’ peace with his coffee and the newspaper before his crowd of lovable ruffians—including and perhaps particularly the one already eyeing him over the back of the couch—arrived, but evidently that little plan’s been scuttled before it made it out of port.  He crosses to the couch to hand over the newspaper, since Ed’s going to make a point of ignoring him at various points during their conversation anyway, and one of them might as well get caught up on current events in the process.

“You’re up early,” he says.

The slightest hint of an odd sort of tightness touches Ed’s eyes as he reaches up to snatch the newspaper out of Roy’s hands, but then it’s gone again.  “Couldn’t sleep.  Took a nap on the train, like an _idiot_ , so it’s my own fault.”

Roy keeps his hand extended, blinking as slowly as he can.  His minute muscle control isn’t nearly as pronounced when he hasn’t yet had his caffeine, but he musters a nice, subtle, expectant bit of fingertip waggling nonetheless.

Ed, of course, has already cracked open Roy’s newspaper and commenced a stint of some well-practiced ignoring of his superior officer.  “Report’s on your desk.  Dropped it off when I showed up.”

Roy saunters over towards his desk, doing his best not to aggravate the lousy no-good excuse for a rib.

This is interesting.  Usually prying reports out of Ed is roughly akin to pulling teeth, and Ed does his admirable best to get away with an oral presentation supplemented by the vaguest of outlines.  “Thank you.  Is there a particular reason you were sitting in the dark?”

“Trying to snag a nap,” Ed says.  “I live in hope or whatever shit.”

“Bless your bountiful heart,” Roy says.  Gingerly, he sits.  The small, stapled stack of sheets on his desk is… unexpected.  He pages through.  “Is this… finished?”

“Jeez,” Ed says.  “You complain when I give you drafts; you complain when I give you shit that’s done; you complain when I give you overviews; you complain when I give you ‘novels’; you complain when the sun shines, and oxygen’s breathable, and—”

“I play to my strengths,” Roy says.  Fortunately, trying to skim and snark at the same time is one of his strengths, too, these days.  There has to be a catch to this.  “Your works of fiction are delightful, but if I put them in the records room, we’re both dead meat, and you know it.”

“We’re dead meat anyway,” Ed says.  “Just give it a couple decades.  Or in your case, a couple days.”

“My poor ego,” Roy says.  “Will it ever recover?  No one knows.  Can you give me a hint?”

“About what?” Ed asks.  “How to get that stick out of your ass?  I dunno how you fit it up there in the first place with your head there already.”

“About what’s wrong with your report,” Roy says.

“Holy hell,” Ed says.  “I show up at the crack of dawn and hand you the exact thing you’ve been _begging_ me for all of these years, and instead of gettin’ down on your knees and thanking your every single lucky star for the day I was born, you wanna sit there and whine about it?”

“‘Want’ is a fascinating word choice in that sentence,” Roy says.  “Surely I don’t have to explain the concept of patterns and anomalies to you.”

“Maybe I turned over a new leaf,” Ed says.  “And maybe I’ll turn it back if you keep giving me grief about what you’ve been saying was a good thing all this time.”

Roy folds his hands on top of the fishiest report that’s ever landed on his desk, including the one that _reeked_ of dead marine life after Ed ‘accidentally’ dropped his draft in a puddle at the market.  “You do realize that the harder you try to convince me that this is normal, the less it’s going to work.”

Ed scowls down at the newspaper.  “Whatever.  What time is it?”

Roy has learned to roll with the punches when it comes to the leaps of logic in Ed’s trains of thought: he checks his watch.  “Ten minutes to eight.”

“Cool,” Ed says.  “Library’ll be open by the time I get there.  Got some research ideas while I was digging through Robertson’s library.  If this pans out, I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

Roy opens his mouth to say _I should hope so_ , but the words disintegrate halfway across his tongue, because a flicker of a wince crosses Ed’s face as he slings himself up off of the couch.

This is disconcerting for two primary reasons: firstly, Ed has such an unimaginably high tolerance for pain that any outward indication is a _very_ bad sign; secondly, especially in this latest post-quest stage of his ostentatiously exciting life, Ed has developed a habit for attempting to minimize his impact on others, in some sort of bizarre and likely well-intentioned effort never to impose on anyone.  He would have been doing his damnedest to suppress even the slightest expression of physical discomfort showing through on his face.  If it bested him, this must be serious.

In typical style, however, Ed doesn’t give Roy time to comment.  “See you later,” he says, reaching for the doorknob.  “Maybe.  Possibly.  If you buy me food.”

“Edward,” Roy says.

Ed turns slowly and glares back over his shoulder.

Roy holds out a hand.  “May I have my newspaper back?”

Ed hesitates just long enough to take a breath before he turns, scowling again, and stalks back towards the desk.  “Whatever,” he says again, thrusting it out with his right hand for Roy to take.  “Nothing good in this one anyway.”

Roy lays it on the desktop and does not fail to notice the way that Ed’s eyes track it even after he’s let go.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Roy says.  “Everyone missed you.”

Ed’s nose wrinkles adorably as his whole face scrunches up in bewilderment.  “I was gone for, like, three days.”

It was four and a half.

“Even so,” Roy says.

Ed heaves such an overstated sigh that Roy can’t help feeling a swell of pride.  “Fine.  I’ll… keep you posted.  Don’t hurt yourself working too hard while I’m gone.”

“No chance of that,” Roy says, cheerfully.

“I was so worried,” Ed says, but before Roy can fire back, he’s slipping out the door, and—

Gone.

Roy draws a deep breath—which hurts so badly that it chokes its way back out of him, rather than being released very slowly, as was the original plan.  Ed has always had a way of tangling up all of his devices.

It’s a pity about the nice little coffee-sipping session he’d intended, but now that Ed has piqued his curiosity with all of the equivocation, he doesn’t have it in him to leave the report where it lies.

It begins ordinarily enough: Ed sets the stage with several details about what he perceives as poor city planning, followed by a characteristic rant about the food, followed by a characteristic rant about the meddling military personnel he had to liaise with.  The interconnected tirades alone take up a full two pages, after which Ed—reluctantly, it seems—segues into talking about the actual investigation, and the merry chase his rogue alchemist target brought him on.  Roy didn’t run nearly so many missions as Ed, obviously, but he’s quite sure he doesn’t remember them involving so much reckless pursuit.  Ed’s many talents certainly seem to include provoking his quarry into making a break for it and managing to turn nearly any situation into a knock-down, drag-out fight.

Unsurprisingly, the latter he usually revels in—to the extent that the reports tend to describe every bout of fisticuffs in exquisite and sometimes excruciating detail.  Roy suspects it’s the one part of documenting these excursions that Ed actually enjoys.

Which makes it all the stranger that this particular report glosses over the final encounter with no more than two sentences about the target demonstrating ‘some resistance’, and Ed demonstrating the wherewithal to have ‘handled it’ before launching right into a description of the way that Robertson was abusing some clever work on intersecting arrays.

Roy sits back.  Embarrassingly, he forgot about his coffee; it’s probably transitioned to the most agonizingly disappointing stage of tepidness by now.  Perhaps if he thinks hard enough while he drinks it, he won’t notice how the temperature has marred the taste.

There’s something wrong here—something pointedly absent.  Something happened during that confrontation that Ed doesn’t want Roy to know about.

He tried to walk away with the newspaper, too.

What’s he hiding this time?

Roy has been careful—cautiously careful, picking his way along the boundary between compassionate and controlling—not to send Ed out on any undertakings that might compromise him emotionally.  There’s already so much at stake on a regular day; Roy _knows_ Ed internalizes a lot of Roy’s stresses, knows Ed doesn’t sleep as well as he used to, knows Ed frets over Al’s assailable corporeal form like worrying will change the way of the world.  They both know it won’t.  But why give him more to carry?  Ed has dragged his weights from one corner of this miserable country to the other; he’s paid his dues plus interest.  It’s about time he had a chance to be as happy as he’s able to.  It’s about time people like Roy did everything in their power to cut him a break.

Ed would flip his lid if he knew that Roy was gently and gingerly but undeniably pulling strings on his behalf, but that’s a risk Roy’s willing to take.  It’s better this way.  Ed knows the taste of trauma.  It’s well past time that someone offered him an opportunity to heal.

The point is that that can’t be—or shouldn’t be, oughtn’t be—what Ed has clumsily tried masking with this macerated excuse for a report.

Roy skims the rest—Ed glosses over the usual ‘stab-your-own-eyes-out-boring-no-offense-Mustang’ witness testimony with the military police, once they’d finally caught up with his heroics, and then a quick retirement to his hotel room, and the dawning of the next day.  That, too, is odd: usually there’s a treatise on whatever meal he finds to reward himself with after succeeding.  Those are always extremely detailed and usually much less profane, which is part of why Roy suspects that they’re actually a restaurant travelogue that Ed one day intends to cobble together for Al, rather than really for himself.

The remaining half-page is a standard—almost rote—complaint about the trains, the train schedules, the train seats, and the train conductors, who purportedly judge their passengers for having long hair.

Roy puts it down.

He looks at it for a few moments.

He picks up the newspaper.

There has to be a connection somewhere—

Commotion in the outer office indicates that the stalwarts have duly made their entrance—or at least that Riza has; given that it’s not yet quite the stroke of eight, Falman is the only other stalwart likely to be present at this point—but Roy has several articles to scan for some slight, tantalizing hint of… what?  What is he even looking for?

When he turns to the regional news section, it is almost _disappointing_.  He was expecting a bit of a chase—a dig, an excavation.  A part of him wanted to fight for it, to sink his teeth in and coax the gears in his head into turning ever faster until they whirred so fast that the motion brought him right up to the brink of revelation.

What he gets instead is a half-page photo of Ed, crouched down with one hand flattened on the cobblestones, blue lightning crackling up around his arm; and the other hand pressed to his ribs.

To—if Roy’s eyes do not deceive him—precisely the same area of his ribs as the area of Roy’s that burst into agony without warning a few brief and bitter days ago.

Roy stares at the photo, and not just because Ed is incandescently beautiful in the heat of battle and always has been.

Then he stares at the caption, which fails to mention the fact that Roy Mustang’s life just took a sharp turn for the incomprehensible and possibly disastrous.

Then he stares at the article, for long enough that his brain reluctantly shivers into gear, engages autopilot, and starts reading the words, at which point he discovers that the journalist responsible for destroying his entire existence saw fit to confirm, in the second line, that this photograph was taken on Thursday evening, shortly after six.

Roy’s voice betrays him, since apparently the rest of the world having done it already isn’t bad enough:

“Riza?” he calls, and it is distinctly possible his voice shakes—but who the hell would blame him?  The whole world seems to be shaking; surely it’s fair if his vocal chords give in to the peer pressure and follow suit; surely—

The silence is extraordinarily brief, followed by the swift footfalls, followed by the door opening a crack—just wide enough for her to put her head in and arch an eyebrow uncertainly.

Obviously he does not wave her over with a semi-frantic motion.  Semi-frantic gestures are for people who don’t have their lives together.  Roy, clearly, has never once in his thirty-four years felt the world spinning out of control beneath his feet.  He’s fine.  Everything is fine.

He… beckons.  In a stately sort of way.  That’s a much better story.

The eyebrow rises further at his extremely dignified and collected series of hand movements, and then higher still as Riza shuts the door behind her, crosses to his desk, and looks down at the newspaper that he’s swiveled around for her to read.

She pauses.

She glances up at him.

She looks down at the text again, and her brow furrows slightly, and she clears her throat, parts her lips, and says…

“Hmm.”

Roy despairs.

“It…” She glances up at him, like she’s gauging how close he is to hurling himself out the window.  Or perhaps like she knows exactly how close he is to hurling himself out the window, and she’s trying to remember if there are bushes underneath.  “It is… _possible_.”

“No, it’s not,” Roy says.  “And if you say ‘Anything is possible’, I’m never speaking to you again.”

“That would be an indescribable tragedy,” she says, so dryly that the desert separating them from Xing must seethe with envy.  “Besides which, I was going to say ‘It wouldn’t be the first time Ed has turned the impossible directly on its head.’”

“That’s basically the same thing,” Roy says.

“What a shame,” Riza says.  “I assume the speaking-to-me embargo starts after this conversation has finished.”

“Of course,” Roy says.  “There may be a slight delay lasting between an hour and several years while I work out the terms of the boycott.  But it’s—the point is—it doesn’t _matter_ what he’s done.  He does unbelievable things on a regular basis, yes, but he doesn’t… he works within the existing fabric of reality; he just re-knits it around himself in the way that he wants.  This isn’t a matter of… This is a legend.  It’s a _myth_.”

The eyebrows go back into action.  “You’ve met a myth.  Arguably two, although the second one you didn’t actually see.”

“Thank you,” Roy says, “for the timely reminder.  That’s different.  The golden sage story was always clearly based off of a genuine historical figure; I just never imagined that he’d still be fumbling his way into our business multiple centuries after the fact.”

“What’s so different about it?” Riza asks.

“This is a _concept_ ,” Roy says.

“A Xerxesian concept,” Riza says.  “Which happens to be manifesting in one of the last two surviving carriers of Xerxesian blood.”

“No,” Roy says.

“‘No’ is not an argument,” Riza says.

“It is so,” Roy says.  “And this doesn’t—it doesn’t make _sense_.  It can’t be—the whole point is duality, and I couldn’t be further from being a descendant of Xerxes, so the whole thing—”

“Roy,” she says, in that tone that always kills the words that have started coiling in the back of his mouth, tensing up to spring.

She waits until he presses his lips together and looks at her—dubiously, still, of course.  He’s not letting go of this one without a fight.

“Philosophizing won’t have any bearing on the facts,” she says.  “If it is true, you’re going to have to find some way to deal with it.”  She tilts her head, considering him.  “You should talk to him.”

He sits back in his chair and spreads his arms.  A grander display of exasperation may be called for, but he doesn’t want to play all of his melodrama cards at once.  Besides, his damn rib hurts.  “And say what?  ‘Welcome back, Ed; I think we’re soulmates’?”

She continues to consider him.  The left corner of her mouth twitches—incrementally, _infinitesimally_ , but he sees it.  She’s laughing at him.  After all this—after everything they’ve done for each other, all the tears and the blood shed, all of the miseries they’ve survived—she is _laughing_ at…

Well, it is a bit funny.  In a sick sort of way.  And it would, admittedly, be nigh-on hilarious if it was happening to someone else.

“Ed does like to get to the point,” she says.  “Perhaps being… direct… actually is the best approach.”

“No,” Roy says.

“‘No’ is still not an argument,” Riza says.

“It’s going to have to be,” Roy says.  “I can’t believe you’re treating this like it’s _real_.”

“Roy,” Riza says again.  That’s the second usage of his given name in as many minutes.  He is, as certain individuals with whom he categorically does not share some sort of mystical connection would say, _fucked_.  “You’ve been sweet on him for a while.”

“‘Sweet on’ and ‘soulmate’ are two drastically different things,” Roy says.

“Drastic is your specialty,” Riza says.

“I’m already having an existential crisis,” Roy says.  “Do you have to be mean?”

Her mouth twitches much more noticeably this time.  That proves it.  Roy is forsaken.  This is the end.

“Let’s think about this logically,” she says.  “There has to be a scientific way to examine the available evidence and test the hypothesis.  It’s theoretically tied to simultaneous shared experiences of one party’s pain, isn’t it?  That should be extremely easy to investi—”

“If you were looking for an invitation to practice hand-to-hand and fling me to the mat in several dozen different humiliating ways,” Roy says, “keep looking.”

“You should talk to him,” she says again.  “Ed’s a terrible liar.  He’ll give you something to go on whether he likes it or not.”

Roy can’t help the cold curl of horror in his chest.  “This is one of those times where I’m inexpressibly grateful that you’re usually on my side.”

“If you get all of your work done,” she says calmly, “it might just stay that way.”

The problem is that Riza has a slightly warped perception of the honesty premise, due to the fact that no one on the face of the planet is capable of lying to _her_.  Whether Ed can look Roy in the eye and carry off a smokescreen is a different matter altogether—he’s gotten craftier over the years; he’s better at hiding than he ever was.  Roy knows precisely who’s to blame for that.

“We’ll see,” he says.

Riza raises both eyebrows this time, which means he’s _really_ in trouble.

“What are you so afraid of?” she asks.

Two can play at this game: Roy raises his eyebrows right back.  “How would you like me to organize the list?  Alphabetical, chronological, topical, in order of likelihood of destroying one or both of our entire lives—?”

“You don’t have as much to lose as you think you do,” Riza says.

“No?” he says.  “You’re ready to watch him walk out that door and not come back this time if I push my luck too far?”

At least that makes her pause for a second.  Slowing down the verbal evisceration counts as progress, even if he’ll never manage to stop it.

“He wouldn’t,” she says.  “He owes you too much.”

Roy sits back and folds his arms.  “And you want me to leverage that?  His sense of obligation, and the very loyalty that makes him such a valuable member of this time?”

Riza shrugs.  “He also _likes_ you too much.”

Roy can’t help making a face.  “Are you sure about that?”

“Yes,” she says.

He makes a bigger face.  “Sure enough to risk an explosion of unprecedented proportions?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Damn it,” he says.  “Fine.  I’ll—see what I can find out.”

“Very good, sir,” she says, and she’s charitable enough to say it looking only _slightly_ smugger than a cat with a mouse in both paws.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep trying to come up with something clever to put here, but I have nothing to say, either about the fic or for myself. XD Enjoy!

Roy Mustang has not made it this far without learning how to do his homework and hedge his bets.

“Aquroya Hospital,” a very harried-sounding receptionist’s voice says.  “How can I help you?”

“I need just a little bit of information about a patient who I’m told checked in with you on Thursday night,” Roy says.  “I’d be ever so grateful.”

There’s a moment’s silence, followed by a not-unexpected “I’m not sure I can do that for you.”

“Oh, dear,” Roy says, eking a tiny inkling of distress into his voice.  Better to start with the hint of panic than the demands—more sympathetic.  “It’s… I’m afraid it’s a bit complicated.  I’m his superior officer, you see, and it’s documented that he checked into a hospital in your area at some point at approximately that time, but he’s left it out of his report.  As you can imagine, this creates all sort of budgetary concerns for me—frankly, I’m not even sure it’s _legal_ for him to omit those sorts of details, but if I can just… verify even the simple fact that he arrived, that’ll give me something to go on.  I think he’s trying not to be a bother—you know how it goes—but it could become so much bigger and messier a concern if it gets away from me, and… well.  You don’t need my sob story.”

“No, it’s all right,” the receptionist says, and he can hear in those four syllables that he’s got ’em.

  


* * *

  


Five minutes before five, Riza pokes her head into his office again.  She looks around.

“You let him bail?” she asks.

“Excuse me,” Roy says.  “When in the history of civilization has a human being ever _let_ Edward Elric do anything?  He just does things.  I told him to come back, and he didn’t.”

She sighs.

“What?” Roy asks.  “Was I supposed to threaten him with bodily harm?”

She sighs again.  That kind of a night.  “At least if you’d had to follow through, that would have served as evidence one way or another.”

“You just reminded me,” he says.  “We _have_ evidence.  I hit him—remember?  After the whole Maria Ross incident.  I didn’t feel a thing.”

She glances back towards the outer office—oh, hell; hopefully his devoted team has skived off five minutes early, and none of them just overheard their fearless leader remarking on the time he punched a fifteen-year-old in the face—and then steps in properly, the better to put her hands on her hips.

“There are a lot of factors that disqualify that as evidence,” she says.  “First, you were so high on adrenaline that night that you probably wouldn’t have felt it if someone had shot you in the kneecap.”  She says that with such authority that he has to brace himself against a shiver.  “Second, you have _always_ had a soft spot for Ed, and even in that situation, I doubt you hit him very hard.”

“I hope you’re right” escapes his mouth before he can call it back, choke it down, and kill it at the bottom of his throat where it belongs.

“Third,” she says, “everyone who’s ever spent much of any time with Ed knows that he has an unreasonably high tolerance for pain, so if it’s connected to nerve sensitivity rather than some sort of standardized metric, it’s not unlikely that it didn’t even chart for him regardless of the force of the impact.”

Roy feels dizzy.  And doomed.

“Fourth,” Riza says, and not without a note of triumph, “I went to the library at lunch and went digging through some of the Xerxesian myth collections, and it is entirely plausible that the pain-sharing symptom doesn’t take effect until the soul connection has been well-established.”  She arches an eyebrow again at his expression.  “You wouldn’t have felt anything until you fell for him.”

“Bullshit,” Roy says, but it sounds startlingly weak even to his own ears.  “I’m not—I don’t—” He pauses.  “The library?  Main branch?”  She nods.  “Was he there?”

“I didn’t check the corners,” she says, “but I didn’t see him.”

“Lying _brat_ ,” Roy says.  “Maybe I’ll threaten him with bodily harm after all.”

“Perhaps you could threaten him with losing his job instead,” she says.

“Are you kidding?” Roy says.  “He’d ask to have it in writing.  He’d _beg_ me to fire him.”

“Threaten him with the prospect of you losing _your_ job,” she says.  “The guilt will bring him to your doorstep at midnight if you need it to.”

Roy—

—winces.  He has to admit it.  The truth is the truth, no matter how he dresses it up most days; and with Riza he is, unfortunately, entirely too real.

“I could never,” he says.  “Can you imagine what that would do to him?  I—”

“Yeah,” Riza says.  “You have nothing but very lukewarm, strictly platonic feelings for sweet, wonderful, noble, beautiful Ed.  Glad we cleared that up.”

“I said none of those things,” Roy says.

Riza smiles.  “That’s what I mean.  You didn’t have to.”

At least the wince transitions easily into a grimace.  “You know that putting words into your superior officer’s mouth is insubordination, right?”

Riza smiles a little more.  “How about if I put some food in his mouth to apologize?”

Roy pushes his chair back, plants his hands on the desk, and stands.  “Lieutenant,” he says, “you might just have yourself a deal.”

  


* * *

  


Food makes him braver, or more reckless.  Sometimes those two things are vastly different; sometimes they’re not.

When he’s put his coat up on the rack at home, before even bothering to remove his boots, he crosses to his telephone makes another call.

The line rings twice before the echoey silence picks up, gives way to a clatter, and then gives way to an “Elric.  What?”

“Good evening,” Roy says.  “It’s a pleasure to speak with you, too.  I do hope you’re having a lovely ni—”

“Like hell you do,” Ed says.

Distantly, Roy hears Al’s voice say “Is that Roy?”, which is… probably a bad sign.  He’s not sure which direction the fingerpost points, precisely, but it certainly can’t be good.

“I was being slightly facetious,” Roy says, “but I hope you’re resting up.  That’s not why I called.”

“Hold on,” Ed says.  “Lemme see if I can find a shock blanket.”

Distantly, Roy hears Al’s voice say “Tell him I said hi.”

“Can you be in my office tomorrow at eight?” Roy asks.

Silence.  Interesting.

It stretches several seconds before Ed very slowly says, “Why?”

“Because I want to talk to you,” Roy says.

“About what?” Ed asks, as if it can possibly be anything other than:

“Your report.”

Roy supposes there are a _few_ other things it could be.  There have been formal complaints filed once or twice—although he does have to give Ed credit where it’s due; when they sat down and had proper conversations about the consequences and the feathers that Roy had to unruffle, which transitioned into proper conversations about the issues underlying the outbursts, Ed really… listened.  Despite the requisite pouting, he corrected the behaviors that had prompted the objections as best he could.  There are probably quite a few recruits roaming around Central Command these days that don’t even know Edward Elric’s reputation, because it doesn’t sustain the whispers with actions anymore.

Ed probably doesn’t realize that Roy can hear him swallowing.  Roy can also hear, in the next word, that he’s set his jaw.  “What about it?”

“That’s what we’re going to talk about,” Roy says, “tomorrow at eight.”

“I’m on a really good lead,” Ed says.  “I was gonna go straight in to the library.”

“I’m fairly confident that Central’s main branch will still be standing at eight thirty,” Roy says.

“Easy for you to say,” Ed says.  “Last time I said something like that about a library, the Homunculi destroyed the place overnight.”

“Why don’t you walk past it on your way in?” Roy asks.  “You can verify its safety, _and_ we can talk.  Very efficient.”

Silence again.  Even more interesting.

“I might be coming down with something,” Ed says.  “I don’t wanna get you sick.”

Distantly, Roy hears Al’s voice say “ _Brother_.”

“Edward,” Roy says, “please don’t make me court martial you.”

“Yeah, right,” Ed says.  “I know way too much—you know the kind of shit I could say up there.”

“But you wouldn’t,” Roy says.  “You and I both know that.  You would never sell me out to them, even if I betrayed you first.”  He sighs.  Ow.  Worth it.  “You’re a better man than I am, etcetera and so on; I’m sure your research is fascinating and extremely time-sensitive and all of that nonsense.  Eight o’clock.  I’ll make it quick.”

“You’ve never had a quick conversation in your life,” Ed says.  Is that a hint of a tremor in his voice?  Couldn’t be; couldn’t possibly.

“Perhaps this will be the first,” Roy says.  “Stranger things have happened, don’t you think?”

“No,” Ed says.

“Ed,” Roy says.  “In addition to being your employer, I sometimes dare to dream I might be something like your friend.”

Ed makes an incredibly indistinct sort of noise in the back of his throat—one that could be assent and could be exasperated dismissal, which gives Roy exactly nothing to go on.

“In addition to that,” Roy says, “I know where you live.  Eight.  Tomorrow.  Please don’t make me say ‘or else’.”

“You talk an awful lot,” Ed says, “about people ‘making’ you do stuff you wanted to do anyway.”

“I learned from the best,” Roy says.  “Can I count on you?”

Ed draws a deep breath and lets it out.  “You fucking know the answer to that.”

Roy does.  That’s the part that’s chilling.  “I’ll see you at eight, then.”

“More’s the pity,” Ed says, and hangs up the phone.

  


* * *

  


Roy should have expected it to go this way: Ed is, presumably, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, fuming avidly about his staggeringly unreasonable superior officer.  In the meantime, Roy is lying in his own bed, staring at the ceiling, attempting to extract even one cohesive thread from the enormous tangle of his emotions.

Ed is—

Remarkable, certainly.  Ed would be delighted to hear that the word isn’t large enough to encompass him—that it cannot hope to hold the size of his heart, the brightness of his eyes, the sheer ferocity of his intellect.

But what would it mean?  What would it really _be_?

Roy shouldn’t even think about it—shouldn’t entertain the faintest notion, let alone invite it in for tea and scones and a long, heartfelt chat.

He has thought about it before—he’s tried not to; he never _meant_ to, but his brain enjoys nothing more than tormenting itself, and it toyed with the idea like a kitten with a string, claws and all.

Ed has changed over the years.  Roy supposes they all have; life is a billiards game, played for keeps, and they rebound off each other whether they like it or not.

The question—if this absurd notion isn’t out of it altogether after all—is whether they’ve both changed enough that they wouldn’t kill each other inside of a week.

He supposes they wouldn’t get very far with the execution, pun intended, unless one or both of them went for poison.  That’s not Ed’s style.  He’d want Roy to see it coming and know the reason, and it would almost certainly hurt.

Will they die simultaneously, or only if the end’s bound up in agony?  If one of them goes painlessly, is the connection simply severed?

Well—stupid thought.  It can’t be simple.  Nothing’s ever been simple in Roy’s life, and not much has earned that adjective in Ed’s, either.  Ed tries, though, bless him and his sheer, stubborn benevolence.  He tries as hard as he can to see things in black and white and choose the course that will make the world brighter.

Riza’s wrong.  Roy just admires him and appreciates him—that’s not _love_.  That’s not a joining of souls, a merging of heartbeats; it’s not the basis for a romance; there is no _destiny_ unfurling out before his feet.  Sure, he has feelings for Ed—no one who’s ever spent five minutes at a stretch in Ed’s presence could possibly avoid it.  Sure, sometimes they’re feelings of such enormous warmth and a fondness that it verges on inconvenient; sure, he’s had a passing thought or two about how sublime it would feel to run his fingers through the length of Ed’s incomparable hair.

But he’s not in love.

He’s _not_.

This isn’t denial: it’s deduction.  He knows what love feels like, and knows it all too well—the vertiginous peaks, the eviscerating valleys, the breathless ricocheting in between.  He remembers.  He remembers suffering, remembers misery, remembers dread.  He remembers always knowing, in the back of his mind, that it was different for him than for other people—knowing, with a gut-twisting sort of certainty, that it was terrible specifically because it was something that he was not allowed to have.

That makes sense, after all.  The universe has granted him far more than his share of miracles.  It only makes sense that everyone else’s life-giving sweet liqueur would taste like cinders on the back of his tongue.

Even if there is some kind of link between them, what’s to say it’s going to last?  If this soulmate nonsense can start out of the blue, it only follows that it can end every bit as suddenly.  Even if they try it, even if it _works_ , they might wake up one morning and discover that the whole thing has vanished right back into the air, and their bruises are their own.  What’s the point of leaping off the cliff at all if they’ll both end up broken on the rocks at the bottom?  He doesn’t have it in him to try flying anymore, and Ed knows precisely what happens when you make your own wings.  Neither of them can afford it.

And that’s… fine.

It doesn’t matter.  It’s ridiculous that he’s spent more than forty seconds of his life contemplating it as though it’s even a possibility.

Ed is going to turn up at eight (fifteen) tomorrow, look him in the eye, demand to know what’s wrong with the report, stare in horror when Roy tells him, kick Roy in the shin with the automail foot, and walk back out.  This is _illogical_.  Even if it was remotely plausible, Ed would balk so violently at the sheer wishy-washy romanticism of it all that the whole thing would wilt and rot and crumble before it had ever bloomed.

If it wasn’t so late, Roy would call again and cancel the meeting.  Nothing useful will get said.

And yet—

And yet there was something Ed was hiding.  There was a reason Ed tried to keep the newspaper out of his hands; a reason he retreated to the library and then apparently disappeared from there.  And there was a reason that _his_ injury instantly mirrored itself onto Roy.

Every breath reminds him that this is real.

He doesn’t have to like it—hell, he’s not sure he’s capable of liking it.  Few enough things in this life come under his control; precious little ever bends the way he wants it to.  He’s honed a talent for anticipating, second-guessing, and reacting; for pushing the people who have enough power to change the course of things, so gently that they won’t ever feel his hands against their backs.  He has to follow the flow of the forces around him the vast majority of the time—can’t he just have this one piece of his pathetic existence all to himself?

And _yet_ —

It’s Ed.  Ed has always happened to him; Ed has always bulldozed forward, and the only choices the rest of them have ever had were to grab for a handhold and hang on tight, or to get the hell out of the way.  Ed doesn’t quibble with all the delicate little meddling Roy does on a daily basis; Ed just _is_.  Ed exists with such immense panache that everyone around him has no choice but to follow his lead.  It’s impossible to feel defeated when Ed is in the room.

He’s thinking in circles now, and none of it is any use.  He won’t know anything for sure until he talks to Ed—and likely not a great deal even then, if Ed is anywhere near as recalcitrant tomorrow as he was today.

He lays a hand over his ribs, breathes deep, regrets it, and squeezes his eyes closed.  He has to sleep.  He has to be prepared to read between the lines in the morning.

But what if it wasn’t so bad?

What if it _worked_?

He rolls over onto his side, stares out into the distance, realizes he’s staring at the closet, and closes his eyes again.  Better than looking at a gaping maw in the wall teeming with a dozen identical white shirts.

He tries never to remember the nice things.  He tries not to taunt himself with the other side of it—with the parts that are fantasy instead of prophecy; daydreams instead of fears.

What if it was evenings in the kitchen, with Ed sitting on the countertop swinging his legs and banging his heels on the cabinets while they cooked and play-bickered and talked about alchemy and chemistry and recipes and what hilariously cutting thing Al said today?  What if it was early mornings prodding at each other to see who cracks first and gets up to turn off the alarm, mumbling about the evils of the workday all the while?  What if it was mid-mornings, late-mornings, early afternoons on the weekends, tangled up and sprawled all over each other on the couch, drinking too much coffee and reading every last word in the paper not because they’re any use, but because having to leave the nest of warmth and limbs sounds to terrible altogether to contemplate?  What if it was midnights lying right here, gazing in each other’s direction in the dark, talking about nothing and everything until the encroaching edge of sleep was warping all their sentences, and one last kiss and stroke of the hair was all they managed before it swallowed them?

What if it was little notes of scrawled encouragement crammed in between the thickets reports in his in-box, so that every time he finished one of the tough ones, a tiny, hand-written _hand their asses to them, you’re almost there_ turned up before he reached the next monstrosity in the pile?  What if it was taking the long way home and savoring every extra minute, because the bakery with Ed’s favorite desserts would still be open, and Ed’s eyes would light up like shooting stars when he unwrapped them?  What if it was long nights out wandering the city, wide-eyed, breath misting, hands clasped tight; and nights in, with takeout and helpless laughter in the glow of the fireplace, slipping by far too fast?

And what if it was more than _that_?  What if it was more than just romance?  The word has been reduced to something so much less substantial than what it ought to mean—like _love_ and _future_ and _fault_ and _sorry_ and all the rest.  But there’s nothing frivolous to it, is there?  Not necessarily.  At its core—two _souls_ joined.  Words and fingertips and flowers are utterly irrelevant.  Ed knows what a soul costs.  Roy knows what one can be sold for.

What if Ed would be able to hear him— _really_ hear him—in the way that so few people can?  What if he could offer the same solace back?  What if they could help each other, support each other, _unburden_ each other, on the basis of the depth of a connection that they never asked for, never dreamed of, never built—

But they did build it, didn’t they?  The foundations, at least.  Brick by brick; one moment of patience, of tension, of circumspection, of reluctant caution and gingerly-given respect at a time.  They weren’t like they are now, at the beginning.  They constructed this.  They stand taller today—Ed will be glad to hear—because they laid this groundwork by hand.  Roy has always cared about Ed, has always hoped that the world might just see fit to treat him kinder.  But not like this.  Not with this towering depth and ringing certainty.  Not with this much _potential_.

It’s not unthinkable.

That’s the thing that keeps hurling him back into the storm every time he tries to grab on tight to the spar from the shipwreck that paints itself like logic.

He can almost— _almost_ —believe it might be true.

Ed has never been ordinary.  Roy has never been fortunate.  The spindly threads of their lives have always been twined in ways that he’s never hoped to understand; their paths have always traced out parallels and strange collisions.

Ed would complain about his abuse of that piece of mathematical terminology.  Ed already complains about a lot of things, but he does it… differently now.  It’s all habit and no hostility—all snark without a trace of teeth.  Roy can’t remember the last time Ed demonstrated anything he read as real anger.  He can’t remember the last time they _fought_ instead of sending idle volleys back and forth, really just for sport.

Ah—that’s not quite true.  Ed took him to task once of an evening, when the two of them and Riza were sitting around the office table, trying to finish out the forms.  Roy said something intended to be dry, which came out sounding hopeless, and Ed went _off_ —reminding him of what it means, of what it’s for, of why it matters, of everything and everyone they sacrificed to get here, of why he can’t give up.  It’s the only occasion he can think of where he saw the same ferocity he used to earn on a weekly basis in the days before.

But that doesn’t prove a damn thing.  Ed’s grown up—Roy had nothing to do with it, except perhaps tangentially; it has nothing to do with him.  Time has passed.  The world has changed.  It’s stopped sucker-punching Ed every time he lowers his guard, for one thing.

Or has it?  When was the last time Roy saw him vulnerable?  When was the last time Ed let him _in_?

He hasn’t done anything to deserve it—hasn’t done anything to make Ed feel safe enough to tear down the walls, open the gates, unbar the doors, lower the drawbridge, call off the alligators, tell the guardsmen to raise their spears…

Speculation.  This is speculation, and none of it will change any of what unfolds tomorrow.  How is he going to start this?  What is he going to say?  When Ed sets his incomparable mind to it, his armor’s stronger and thicker and tougher to pierce than Alphonse’s ever was.  Somehow, Roy has to level with him without risking ridicule.

Maybe that’s the trick to it.  Maybe risking ridicule—putting his dignity and composure on the line—is precisely the secret.  Maybe prying his ribcage open first and giving Ed the chance to wound him—proving, past a shadow of a doubt, that Ed can trust the bond already stretched between them—is the skeleton key.

He doesn’t know.  He doesn’t know if Ed’s ever thought about it, and what sort of judgments would have been passed on the whole notion if so.  He doesn’t know any of the answers to the questions.  He doesn’t know how to start, how to describe it, whether he’s barking up a tree full of bees.

He doesn’t know how much blood this exchange is going to take.  He doesn’t know how much it’s liable to hurt if he’s wrong.

He doesn’t know anything for sure—except that if the souls of the dead do somehow, some way, look down on the travails of the living, Hughes must be laughing his incorporeal _ass_ off over Roy Mustang indulging all these domestic fantasies.

At least there’s that.

  


* * *

  


The door to the outer office creaks open at five minutes to eight.

It’s probably Riza, but he looks up and watches his doorknob just in case.

He’s been here almost half an hour now, desperately trying to caffeinate enough to feel prepared to fling himself at the morning’s quest.  So far it’s looking like a toss-up as to whether he’ll fortify himself or vibrate out of the visible spectrum first.

The doorknob starts turning.  He looks down at the report he’s been prodding with his pen for several minutes and attempts to appear engrossed.

The door opens.  In as leisurely a fashion as humanly possible, he looks up.  A single gold eye has appeared in the gap.  In case he’d had any doubts as to its owner’s identity, it is glaring at him, which rather clears that up.

Roy dips his gaze back down to the report, pretending very avidly that he has the slightest idea what it says.  “Would you prefer to stand there to conduct this conversation, or would you like to come in and sit down?”

“I dunno,” Ed says.  “I don’t know what this is about.  Don’t reckon we can get it done through the doorway, though, given how much you love the sound of your own voice.”

Roy’s heart does an _awful_ little squishy-squeeze thing at the way the early hour just brought the East out in every one of Ed’s vowels.

“Good morning to you, too,” he says.

Ed slides in and shuts the door behind him, a touch louder than it really merits.  “You started it.”

He’s right, although of course Roy would die in agony before admitting it.

Hopefully that won’t be necessary, but at the rate he’s going now—

He shuffles the previous report aside, draws out the manila folder with Ed’s latest narrative masterpiece, and smoothes a hand across the cover.  Ed’s standing almost exactly a yard away from his desk, feet planted wide, arms folded tight, like he’s bracing for a hurricane.

Perhaps they both are.

Roy taps his fingertip on the top sheet.  “There’s something missing from your report.”

“Is it fancy cursive in fine penmanship?” Ed asks.  “I keep telling you; if you want legible, you gotta requisition me a typewriter.  Those are your only two choices.”

“I did requisition you a typewriter,” Roy says.  “You put a metal finger through one of the keys within the first half-hour.”

“Fuery fixed it,” Ed says.  “Mostly.”

“Mostly,” Roy says.  “And that wasn’t what I meant.”

“I’d ask what you mean,” Ed says, “but I know you’re gonna tell me anyway.”

Roy folds his hands, knitting his fingers together.  It always looks calm and debonair, and it always makes it impossible for an observer to see if they’re unsteady.

“Your hospital visit,” he says.

Ed sets his jaw.  The magnificent eyes narrow noticeably, but they stop just short of darting towards the door.

“Jeez,” he says.  “What the hell ever happened to doctor-patient confidentiality?”

“I’m a general in the state military,” Roy says.  “They’re a government-funded hospital.  I’m confident that you can do the math.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Two plus two equals corruption.  And—grift?  Is this grift?  I’ve always wanted to say that.”

“Coercion, possibly,” Roy says.  “Although only in the strictest sense of the word.  I was _very_ nice.  I understand the incident where you were injured took place last Thursday evening, shortly after six.”

Ed swallows.

“Might’ve,” he manages.  “I wasn’t paying particularly close attention to the clock, on account of getting socked in the ribs with a rake handle.”

Somehow the newspaper left out the rake.  You really can’t trust journalists these days.

“Interesting,” Roy says.  He knits his fingers a tiny bit tighter.  “Would you like to hazard a guess as to what happened to me shortly after six o’clock on Thursday?”

“You choked on your own ego,” Ed says, looking intently at the wall.  “Your head finally got too big to fit through the door, and you had to call the firefighters and then a construction crew.  You strained your hand making paperclip chains, and Lieutenant Hawkeye told you that you were gonna have to get automail so you could keep doing paperwork.  Your desk collapsed under the weight of all the stuff you’re ignoring.  Th—”

“Ed,” Roy says.

Ed glances towards him, and their eyes meet, and—

He _knows_.

In that single diamond-edged instant, every facet of their pocket of the universe seems utterly clear.  They’re two atoms twirling through the emptiness of the ether, spinning in space, but the magnetism between them sings with _understanding_ , and—

Not a shadow of a doubt.  Not a fragment; not a flash.

It drops into the pit of Roy’s stomach like wet cement.

And it hardens.

And it goes cold.

“You knew,” Roy says, and it’s the truth.  He can feel it in his blood and hear it in his heartbeat.

Ed says nothing, but Roy knows the precise angle of his jawline well enough by now—it shifts, just slightly, as he clenches his teeth a little harder.

That’s answer enough.

The strange echoey sensation around Roy’s head, like he’s stuck it into a huge brass bell recently struck and ringing, does not quite stop him from asking, “How long?”

Ed’s looking at the floor, now, for a change.  He hikes in a breath, holds it for a few seconds, and lets it out.

“What difference does it make?” he asks.

_All the difference in the world,_ Roy thinks as the universe tilts and swings wildly around him.  _How long have you been carrying this on your own?_

“How did you find out?” he asks instead.  It’s a meaningless question, against the face of the rest of it— _that_ is the part that doesn’t matter.

Except that it does, doesn’t it?  Because it would, necessarily, have involved Ed being in pain; and it would have scared the _hell_ out of him.

Ed draws another breath and does not look up from the carpet.  “There was—I sort of—suspected.  And then when you slammed your finger in that file cabinet drawer, it—”

“That was more than a year ago,” Roy says, and if his voice sounds faint and distant and flabbergasted even to his own ears, that’s because it _is_.  And he is.  And he could almost swear that he can feel a tingle in the knuckle he battered the worst in that incident; he could almost swear the bruises are rising to the surface after so many months of dormancy to damn him all over again.

Ed pauses in attempting to incinerate the carpet with his eyes long enough to level that look on Roy for a second.  “I’m good at keeping secrets.”

“No, you’re _not_ ,” Roy says.

They stare at each other for several moments that feel like individual centuries, complete with the rise and fall of multiple ruling powers.

Ed has had an entire year to unpack all of his thoughts—which are always complicated—and his feelings—which are always vehement—about this whole unimaginable situation.  He’s had an entire year to work his way through it, research the history, test the limits—

And he said… nothing.

He gave no sign, or none that Roy could read.

They coexisted in this office for over a _year_ —albeit one wherein Ed’s increasing insistence on more and more expansive missions makes, in retrospect, a lot more sense—and Ed gave no indication of any of it.  Ed, who used to struggle to go more than a few weeks without mentioning, sometimes to total strangers, that he’d committed alchemy’s greatest taboo and suffered the consequences, hasn’t breathed a _word_ about this in something like fourteen months.

What could that possibly mean except that he hates the very idea more than he can hope to describe?

“Obviously I figured it out,” Ed says.

“Obviously,” Roy says, because absolutely nothing else will come to mind.  His skull is rattlingly empty; his brain is roaringly blank— “Well—what—do you propose we do?”

Ed eyes him a touch more mistrustfully yet.  “Do?”

Roy wants to spread his hands, but he’s not sure he can keep them stable yet.  “I was under the impression that it might… go away, but if it’s been at least a year already, that’s fairly unlikely, s—”

“The fuck do you think we’re gonna _do_?” Ed says.  “It’s a—it’s like a—prophecy or something.  Like a curse.  You can’t _do_ anything.”

“You’re the premiere alchemist,” Roy says, “in the country, if not the world; and I’m a scheming politician.  Surely between the two of us, we can find some sort of a loophole.”

Ed stands very still and breathes very lightly.  His eyes flick up Roy’s face and then down again, and then they fix on the floor.

“Guess you’re right,” he says, and Roy would really like that as a signed affidavit for future reference.  “Figure that’s my cue to get back to the library, so…”

Roy should feel relieved.  He should be glad this conversation is over—glad they both made it out unscathed; glad they’re apparently on the same page that this whole thing is a terrible impediment, even if not quite a travesty, and they need to find a way to fix it.  He should be delighted to have dodged a bullet that was aimed directly at his coronary arteries; delighted to have skirted another round of bloodshed for both of them.  He should feel happy.  He should feel satisfied.  Content.

He feels like he took another blow to the ribs, and this one hit him harder.

He opens his mouth on instinct, and what comes out is: “I don’t feel right devoting time to this while we’re both on the clock.”

For the length of a _split_ -second, Ed’s face crumples.

Then he breathes out, bites his bottom lip, and shrugs.

“S’fair,” he says.  “Like I said last night, I’m on to something good.  I’ll keep going with it ’til five or so and then see what I can dig up about this.  How’s that?”

That is, in theory, exactly what Roy wanted.

“Perfect,” he says.  “But for the fact that I also don’t feel right letting you do all of the work.”

This time, it’s the corner of Ed’s mouth that twitches—downward, sharply—before he wrangles his face back under control.

“Back up,” he says.  “Who are you, and what have you done with Roy Mustang?”

“Very funny,” Roy says.  “I mean it.  It’s not your responsibility—besides which, two heads are better than one, even if mine doesn’t always fit through doorways.  If I recall, the ones at the library are a bit larger than standard, so with any luck, I’ll make it through.”

Ed takes and releases three full breaths, eyeing him all the while, before responding.  “Fine.  I guess.”

“Excellent,” Roy says, as if briskness has overcome awkwardness even once before in his life.

“Yeah,” Ed says, and the position he’s held for the duration of this conversation makes it all too easy for him to turn on his heel and reach for the doorknob again.  “See you.”

Surely if Roy opens his mouth and waits, something clever and intelligent will emerge and rescue the both of them from this skin-crawling strangeness.

Nothing comes out.

Ed shuts the door.

He doesn’t even slam it, and for some reason that… hurts.

Riza waits a generous ninety seconds before she sticks her head in.  She raises an eyebrow.

“I handled it,” Roy says.

She raises the other eyebrow.

Roy sets an elbow on his desk and leans his head on his hand.  “When are you going to start believing me when I say that?”

“As soon as you give me a reason to,” she says, and gently closes the door.

  


* * *

  


He never thought he’d miss libraries, but there’s something sacred about them—something kind, something unassuming.  They’re quiet with a sort of reverence, as if the weight of the as-yet-unread knowledge in the air suppresses sound.  So much of the world is boisterous and endlessly demanding that stepping inside the welcome of these walls feels rather a lot like coming home.

He wanders purposelessly for a while—or, at least, with only the purpose of letting the silence sink in and calm some of the quaking in him.  There’s always so much to do, so much to think of, so much to _be_ , but here, in this instant, the identity of a solitary figure in between the stacks is… enough.  That’s all he’s meant to do here.  That’s all that’s asked.  Perhaps it’s no surprise that Ed always retreats to this place as a sanctuary.

Speaking of Ed, Roy’s aimless strolling eventually turns him up at a little reading table in a back corner.  Unsurprisingly, he’s barely visible behind several piles of books; surprisingly, he doesn’t say _It’s about time_ or _You must’ve been pretending real hard to be working_ or _For a second there, I actually believed you when you said you wanted to contribute_.

He doesn’t even glance up from the text of the respectable tome he’s cracked open—just reaches out and pushes a small stack of books closer to the side of the table where Roy lingers, and says, “Start with these.”

“Thank you,” Roy says, drawing out the chair Ed left for him.  He’s no stranger to deals with lesser demons, and it never hurts to be polite.

Except, of course, when it does.  It tends to be a roulette game with Ed: his deeply-ingrained tendency to doubt anything that looks like kindness frequently clashes with his small-town country boy charm, and it’s anybody’s guess which one will win out on any given day.  Roy’s not sure he feels lucky.

After the first hour, he’s confident he doesn’t.

After the second hour, he’s positive he won’t.

He tries to wait for a moment when it looks like Ed’s focus has thinned, but the intensity seems utterly uniform for a long stretch—Ed has his cheek squished against the heel of his left hand, head tilted down so that his bangs dangle like a pale curtain in the dimming light, and through them Roy can just make out the way his eyes keep swinging back and forth across the lines of text.  He reaches down to turn a page, but the automail fingertips don’t gain traction, and then he startles a little, as if waking from a dream.  His face scrunches up again as he sits back and lowers his left arm.

“Ed,” Roy says.

He startles significantly harder this time, and then he blinks, and almost-smiles before he takes up scowling.  “What?”

“I’m going to go get us some food,” Roy says.

Ed relocates from scowl territory into glower land.  Darling.  “Why?”

“Because it’s almost eight o’clock,” Roy says.  “And because I’m hungry, and I imagine you are, too.  I’m told consuming nutrients is the most efficient way t—”

“Fine,” Ed says, making a great show of shifting in the chair to start digging through his pockets.  “How much do you think you’re gonna spend?  I think I’ve got cash, but I’m not giving you any extra, because you’ll just take it and put it into your personal beauty care routine fund or something, so—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Roy says.  “My treat.”

Ed goes still and stares with his left hand still buried in his right-side trouser pocket.

“No,” he says.

“‘No’ is not an argument,” Roy says, and if he turns on his heel a bit too swiftly and waves over his shoulder a bit too smugly—well.  There aren’t too many pleasures left in life.  “Be back soon.”

“Bastard,” Ed calls after him, but not too loud.

Roy really _does_ love libraries.

  


* * *

  


He loves them slightly less when he notices the rather stark, rather red _No Food Allowed_ sign next to the door, but that’s what brilliant improvisation is for.

He draws his chair back out when he reaches their table, which makes Ed’s head pop up.  Evidently approaching footsteps don’t register high enough on the distraction scale to merit a pause in reading, but it seems that someone fixing to sit down beside him is still sufficient.  That makes… frighteningly good sense, actually.

Ed blinks at him again, then frowns again.  “Librarians bust you?  Gladys almost decked me over a cookie once.”

“Shame on her,” Roy says, retrieving the bag he stashed by hiding it against his back, covered by the drape of the coat hanging from his shoulders.  Gently, he shepherds some books aside with his free hand so that he can set the bag down in their footprint.

Ed’s eyes are almost luminescent, and Roy could swear that his nose twitches.  “Xingese?  You got Xingese takeout?”  He reaches for the bag, gets both hands around it, then glances up and grins.  “Thanks.  What’re you having?”

“Your head on a platter,” Roy says, as blithely as possible, as he sits.  It came out sounding a bit more grotesque than he wanted, but considering that he had to substitute for _your ass_ in the barest nick of time, he’ll cut his losses.  “Or whatever scraps are left in the bag.”  He gestures to the literature.  “Where are we with all this?”

Ed uses the automail fingers to extract a still-steaming potsticker.  He puts it into his mouth without even blowing on it and talks straight through it.  “’Bout the same place we were two hours ago.”

“Damn,” Roy says.

Ed eyes him for just a quarter of a second before shrugging hugely and delving his hand back into the bag.  “See why I ask for so much time for research?  It’s not ’cause it’s _fun_.”

“Don’t give me that,” Roy says.  “You love research.  _And_ you love giving me a hard time.”

Ed keeps a brand-new glare fixed firmly on Roy while slowly and deliberately extracting another potsticker and cramming it into his mouth.

“What?” Roy says.

“You’re a dweeb,” Ed says.  “We’re off-work, so I can say that.”

“You say that in my office at least once a week,” Roy says.

“I wouldn’t say ‘dweeb’ in your office,” Ed says.  “I’d say ‘dipshit’.”

“At least once a week,” Roy says.

“I think the average is probably closer to once every…” Third potsticker.  Roy makes a mental note that Ed really likes those and then wonders why he did that.  “…eleven days, maybe?  I try to vary the vocabulary.  Keep it fresh.”

“How considerate,” Roy says.

“Do my best,” Ed says.

The book Roy had been working on hadn’t yielded anything promising yet, so he sets it aside, selects a new one, and cracks it open.  “A model employee,” he says, “as always.  It’s terribly remiss of me not to have your picture up on the wall.”

“You’d have to pick me every month,” Ed says.  “It’d lower morale.”

“Terrible,” Roy says.

“Terrible,” Ed says.

A hand that obviously does not belong to Edward Elric, unabashed claimant of all of the food, nudges the bag a little closer to Roy’s side of the table and then retreats.

Roy tries very hard not to smile.

  


* * *

  


Another hour brings them to the bottom of the takeout bag, the cusp of closing time, and the end of another useless book each.

Roy leans back in his chair and grapples with the wince trying to stretch itself across his face.  His eyes sting, his head throbs, and his back aches something awful.

And—of course—his rib hurts.  Every single breath.

He watches Ed pull down another book, sling the cover open, page through the table of contents, and hunker down to dive in.

His hair’s in his face again.  How does he ever get anything done?  The impulse to reach across the table and brush it out of his eyes jolts through Roy so strongly that he almost gives right in to it.  The hair hides the pale scar above Ed’s right eyebrow most of the time.  Sometimes it hides his eyelashes, which is a shame; sometimes it hides his eyes, which is a _crime_.  The longer layers of his bangs extend just far enough to curl against his jaw on the rare occasions he sits upright; Roy finds himself swanning through the abstract thought that he is _jealous_ of their privilege to graze Ed’s skin just there.  It’s so tempting.  He wouldn’t even have to slide his chair an inch; if he extended his arm, he could easily reach to—

“Why are you staring at me?” Ed asks without looking up.

Roy listens to his heartbeat in his head.  “I wasn’t.  I was staring into space.  You happened to be in the way.”

At least that garners Ed’s full attention, complete with yet another glare.

“Regardless,” Roy says, “I think it’s time to be… realistic.”

The glare deepens.

“There might not be a way out of this,” Roy says.  “We may just have to… cope.”

Ed sits back and folds his arms across his chest.  This expression is not quite a glare—which is unfortunate, actually, because it’s significantly harder to read.  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Roy looks over the scattered stacks of books, pushes the hand that feels less takeout-greasy back through his hair, and releases a breath very slowly, trying not to aggravate the rib any worse than he has to.  It’s a lost cause, of course, but those are getting to be his specialty.

“Isn’t it possible that we can just—ignore it?” he says.  “If you’ve gone an entire year now without it really changing anything, and I didn’t even _notice_ , then… perhaps it’s just… not all that important after all.”

There’s a particular hollowness to the silence that makes him look at Ed, whose face has gone so utterly blank that it makes Roy feel… cold.

Ed swallows.

Then he looks down, closes his book, shoves his chair back, stands, and grabs up his bag.

“Fine,” he says, slightly—hoarsely?—as he throws the bag over his shoulder and starts past Roy’s chair.  “Great.  G’night.”

“Ed,” Roy says, twisting in his chair.  Ed’s cavalry skirt ripples behind him as he strides towards the exit—but Roy can’t shout, can’t call, can’t demand to know what just—

“Sir?” a rather clipped female voice says.

He blinks up at the librarian who just materialized out of the shadows to loom over him.

“Hello,” he manages.

“Closing time,” she says.  She looks at the rather damning grease stains decorating the outside of the paper bag on the table.  “What’s that?”

“ _That_?” Roy says.  “I haven’t the slightest idea.  Whoever was sitting here before us left it behind.  We thought it would be best not to touch it in case they came back.”

She gives him a look so staggeringly disapproving that it is entirely plausible that Roy has just found a distant relative of Riza’s.  How serendipitous.

“I’ll just be going,” Roy says, attempting to scramble to collect his coat with as much dignity as possible.

“Very good, sir,” the librarian says.

  


* * *

  


When Roy spreads his arms out, he can’t quite reach both sides of the bed—even when he stretches.  That’s always felt like a luxury, before tonight.

Tonight, it feels like hubris.

Tonight, it feels like he’s made an unconscionable mistake.

But he did the right _thing_ —didn’t he?  He steered their course towards the better path for both of them.  If they tried to force this tiny tendril of connection in between them to hold any real weight, it would split, and they’d bleed, and Roy is just so _tired_ of mopping and salving and bandaging.  He’s done enough to ruin Ed’s life over the years.

And—yes, things have changed over the course of the last couple years.  Ed’s incandescent independence has crystallized until he’s less like a fiery streak searing through the night sky and more like a lighthouse on the shore.  Roy has gradually learned how to address and acknowledge and defuse some of the mines buried in among Ed’s emotions instead of simply hoping that he doesn’t take the wrong step.  And yes, tonight was… pleasant, to a point.  Sharing each other’s company outside of the office was much more enjoyable even than he’d expected, regardless of the reason.  Friday nights at the pub have taught him numerous times that Ed tends to be funny and clever and companionable in a neutral setting, but this was better still.  They stole food from each other and then swapped food-stealing hall-of-fame stories; Roy poked fun at Ed’s struggle to balance chopsticks precisely in his left hand and got one of the chopsticks thrown at his head.

A part of Roy knows it wasn’t the magic of the place—wasn’t some sort of solidarity enforced by the need to whisper and watch each other’s backs for prowling librarians who would bust them for breaking the rules.  But it’s better to believe that.  It’s easier.

The fact that they’re comfortable together now doesn’t mean that they’re compatible.  A solitary evening is a single point.  A dot on a graph means nothing.  It’s a speckle.  It’s dust, not data.  This is not evidence; it is not proof; it is not _meaningful_.  It doesn’t count.

It doesn’t count for anything.

He did the right thing.  He _knows_ he did.

He pulls the pillow over his face and tries to force himself to sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't choose the cheesy epilogue life; the cheesy epilogue life chose me.
> 
> Thank you guys so much for all of the love for this fic!!!! ♥ I hope 2019 treats you all with the care and courtesy and respect that you absolutely deserve. And if it doesn't, I hope you kick its sorry ass. ♥

His head jerks up from the current report—despite his best intentions to concentrate immovably for several grueling hours, he would like the record to show—at five minutes past eight the next morning when he hears Kain say, “Hey, Ed!” at the opening of the door.  Especially after last night’s… rather… abrupt… parting salutation, he was expecting another day of library work from Ed, and possibly a pay phone update at the stroke of five if Ed felt generous about demonstrating that he was making progress.  They’ve reached an equilibrium over the years—Roy knows that Ed will give him solid, serious, creative work for the hours he’s being paid for, supervised or not; Ed knows that Roy’s goodwill in that regard isn’t extended to him unconditionally, and he has to keep earning it.  If Ed delivers every time Roy takes off the leash, then everybody goes home happy.

He thought Ed would be at the furthest reaches of the lead today, though.  This is… interesting.

“Hey, Sarge; ’morning, Lieutenant” is all Ed says in return, which gives Roy nothing to go on.  A chair scrapes out from the table, and then everything goes silent again.

More interesting still is the curious little prickle of Ed’s presence—like a breath against the back of Roy’s neck; like a tug on a string around his sternum.  It’s gentle enough that he can almost ignore it—he can zero in on the toil and the drudgery enough that he doesn’t quite _feel_ it anymore, but there’s a part of him still… sensing.  There’s a part of him humming in quiet acknowledgement of the fact that Ed is there.

There’s an odd sort of warmth to it.  He’s not sure yet if it’s pleasant, or if it’s going to bite him in the back of the throat if he lets himself taste too much of it.

He’s muddled through a few more hours when a knock at the door rouses him from some combination of frustration and scheme and reverie.  He tries not to shake his head exactly the way a bewildered dog might do as he glances up.  “Come in.”

He knows before the knob turns that it’s Ed.  It had to be from the knock—didn’t it?  Not some sort of indescribable, indistinguishable psychic awareness of Ed’s corporeal being.

Everyone knocks a bit differently.  His brain has probably catalogued them all to save him some heart-stopping terror over time.

It’s fine.

All of this is fine.

Ed slips in, closes the door gently behind him, and pauses just a single step inside again—keeping his distance.  His expression reads painstakingly neutral, which could not have come as naturally to Ed as it always does to Roy; he half-raises his left hand with several sheets of paper in it.

“I wrote it up,” he says.  “The… rest of that report.  The missing parts.”

Roy aims for painstakingly neutral, too.  It only seems fitting.  “Ah.  That was thoughtful of you.  I appreciate it.  The narrative always loses so much flavor when I try to imitate your style and fill in all the blanks.”

Ed had been staring intently at the paper in his hand, but he glances up so that Roy can’t mistake his skepticism.  “I don’t have a style.”

“Believe me,” Roy says.  “You do.”

Ed eyes him for another second and then fixes his attention on the paper again.  “I… left a couple things out.  Obviously.  But most of it’s here.”

He means things like the sinking feeling that accompanied the winded, breathless, adrenaline-jittering shock when his adversary clocked him in the ribcage, and he knew that Roy couldn’t possibly mistake this as some sort of a coincidence.

Roy shouldn’t know that—he could presume it; he could guess at it; but he shouldn’t _know_.  He shouldn’t feel it.  It shouldn’t ring in the center of his chest with a certainty like a sunrise.

“Ed,” Roy says.

Ed crosses to his desk in a few quick strides, smacks the sheets down on the very edge, and retreats again.

“Is it okay if I go back to the library?” he asks.  “I’m real close to something good.  I can write that up for you later, if you want.”

Roy knows he did the right thing.

“Fine by me,” he says.

“Cool,” Ed says, and then he’s gone.

  


* * *

  


Roy has spent altogether too much time this week lying in bed and doubting every last one of his life choices.  Normally, he only has to doubt up to a certain point, and everything after that seems relatively logically sound.  But this week—

This week, he’s a pining fool, and he knows in his bones—including the damaged one—that Ed, on the other side of Central City, is lying in bed hating Roy’s decisions almost as much as Roy does.

This shouldn’t have happened.  And it wouldn’t have if Ed hadn’t courted the matching bruises on both their ribs—it wouldn’t have if the suggestion hadn’t been crammed into Roy's head.  It wouldn’t have if the possibility hadn’t appeared on the doorstep of his mind and started banging on the door with an automail fist curled tight.

It wasn’t his mind, was it?  Ed went directly for his heart and didn’t waste any damn time with the door—he put his metal elbow through a window and climbed straight in.  There are shards of glass all over the hardwood, and Roy can’t walk anywhere without lacerating his feet.

But it wouldn’t have happened on its own, out of the blue, of its own power, of his own volition.  He started looking at Ed differently as a direct result of discovering the soulmate connection—not the other way around.  If Ed hadn’t taken that rake handle to the chest, they would have just kept on living their separate lives; he just would have continued jaunting along, one day at a time, without the slightest notion that Ed…

Has known this all along.

Has never spoken of it, never made the slightest indication, never shared the burden of it with Roy—not an ounce of the weight.

All this time—

And that’s just like him, isn’t it?

It’s just like him to choose self-sacrifice without a second thought.  It’s just like him to shoulder it all on his own, bite his lip, lower his head, swallow every last complaint—just like him to disappear on mission after mission to decrease his own chances of giving it away; to slash the statistical likelihood of Roy having the chance to notice, or wonder, or _do_ anything.

Roy can’t decide if what he feels is anger or admiration.  It should have been a joint decision—should have been mutual.  Both of them are involved; both of them have something at stake; Ed should never have taken it upon himself to assume that he knew what was best for both of them and to act accordingly.

Funny how that sounds a touch familiar.  Roy hopes that at the very least, Ed appreciated the irony of keeping _Roy_ in the dark about a larger plan.

He hopes Ed reveled in it.

But he suspects that the prevailing feeling underneath the whole of it was… guilt.  That seems to be Ed’s default, and his fallback, and his trademark.

And that, too, is frustrating as hell, because it was never _necessary_.  If they’d just had the same conversations a year ago, they could have spared Ed however many months he spent stressed about it; they could have talked this through, recognized its unimportance, and _moved on_ instead of leaving Ed with one more secret balanced at the top of the stack.  He carries too much.  He always does; he always has.  He’s going to wreck his back before he’s twenty-five, at this rate.  Do they make automail spines?  Roy hopes not; the whole thing sounds grotesque, and…

And Ed’s been careful, all this time—Ed has walked gingerly, negotiated carefully, and discovered _diplomacy_ while embarking on more unsupervised excursions than ever before.  Ed has stopped punching his problems so that they’d stop kicking back.  And it could be argued, certainly, that he did it for fear of exposing the secret, but Roy suspects that that was the smaller piece of it.  Roy suspects that he learned, and changed, and tempered his own temper by force of will primarily to protect Roy from unexpected pain.

That’s how he is.  That’s _who_ he is.  He bore this alone and fought his own instincts for Roy’s benefit, as best he understood it.

Roy just… cares about him.  Quite a lot, yes; for quite a while, yes; in a curious, peculiar, particular sort of way, with a sharpness and a sweetness and a fondness distinct from nearly everybody else he knows, but it’s—

It’s not possible that there was a fuse curled between them all this time.  It’s not possible that the only thing that they were waiting for was a match.  A lighter.  A spark.

Is it?

He does not believe in destiny.  There is no such thing as _fate_ ; there is only what falls into your lap, and what you do with it.  There is impact, and improvisation.  There is no design; there is nothing foretold; there is no intention in the interweaving of the universe, and they—

Just happen to understand each other very well sometimes.  That’s all.  They’re scientists with similar trajectories, in many of the ways that count.  It was bound to happen.  It doesn’t mean anything.

It doesn’t mean anything at all.

  


* * *

  


Thursday morning greets him with the same combination of gritty-eyed, clammy-skinned regret as yesterday did.  He really needs to give up this middle-of-the-night rumination business before it takes a noticeable toll on his paperwork, or Riza’s going to make him sorry he was ever born.

Well.  Sorri _er_.  But she has enough work to do already.

At least there’s coffee, and more coffee, and his comfortable chair, and a brief interlude with the newspaper, and then more coffee still, and then the stack of requisition forms isn’t nearly so large today as normal.  Perhaps this is some sort of a belated apology from the universe for the unheralded agony of last Thursday.  Perhaps today will be quiet, and he can wrap up by five and get the hell out of here and try _very_ hard to get some better sleep.  Perhaps he can put Ed and this soulmate thing and the shrill, helpless, howling laughter it would rouse from Maes out of his mind altogether.

…since he just thought about it, apparently ‘altogether’ is out.  But maybe he can think about it… no more than that.  Maybe he can stop right here, and put his foot down, and refuse to spend another moment of the day reflecting on the ideal amount of space to give to Ed to make sure that he feels safe and comfortable when he comes back.  This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, does it?  The situation seems ripe for negative interpretations on the surface, certainly, but if he plays his cards _precisely_ right, perhaps he can spin it into something else.  He’s good at spin.  The Amestrian public knows that, although they don’t realize they do.

Perhaps he can play it into a deeper version of the connection they had before—who says soulmates can’t just be… close friends with a profound understanding of one another’s psyches?  They’re already nearly there.  There’s already a level of trust and a sense of belonging and a wealth of mutual respect that—

He was supposed to be not thinking about this.

The bottom line is, he can give Ed at least a few more days to futz about with research, which in this case really means ‘retreat’—he hasn’t determined yet whether another three work days or another four will be the best time to remind Ed, in no uncertain terms, that the leash is long but not indefinite, and results are the only thing keeping all of them in good graces around here.  Ed will whine, but then he’ll produce a bit of brilliance, and it’ll be magnificent, and Roy will attempt to poke some holes in one or two of the more theoretical elements, and likely fail; they’ll have a good laugh about it; Ed will steal a _lot_ of his cheesy fries…

Ed will put one of Roy’s pilfered cheesy fries in his mouth _very_ slowly and close his lips around his fingertip to savor all the cheese.  He’ll raise an eyebrow, and lick his fingers, and what starts as a grin will tilt towards a smirk, and his intention—

Roy flips a new file folder open so hard that the front cover audibly smacks his desk.

He’s not thinking about it.

And he’s not going to.

It’s fine.

  


* * *

  


If he packs up very, very slowly and very, very quietly, Riza won’t pick up on the quitter energy radiating off of him, burst in, and find him something to do until five thirty at the earliest.  It’s three minutes to five.  Who could blame him, after the admittedly self-imposed cataclysm of a week he’s had, for tapping out a hundred and eighty seconds in advance?  That’s not a crime.  Or it won’t be, once he’s accumulated enough power to enact a law for the protection of exhausted, noble, handsome civil servants who rightly deserve—

The door opens, and he snatches up his pen again and leans forward in a desperate attempt to look busy enough to—

Except it’s… Ed.

He blinks.

Evidently, his instincts were sound, and he needs to make a break for the door, because it appears that the last of his wit has abandoned him in the desert of his otherwise extremely stupid brain.

“I thought you were at the library,” he says.

“I was,” Ed says.  The roll of papers in his left hand is very thick, and the two books tucked underneath his right arm are even thicker.  “Now I’m not.  That’s how the past tense works.”

“Revelatory,” Roy says.

“Do my best,” Ed says.  “You got a minute?”

Roy does not have a minute.  He does not even have a quarter of a second.  He needs to go home and bury his head under the covers and sleep like the dead.

“I suppose,” he says, sitting back and steepling his hands.  He then has to extract one from the steeple in order to point at the mass of dead trees Ed’s toting around, which is further proof that he’s reached a critical point with the sleep-deprivation; he can’t even plan his gestures properly.  “What’s all this?”

“I told you I was going to report back on the research I was working on,” Ed says.  He crosses to the desk; unabashedly drops everything on top, heedless of what Roy had been attempting to pretend to finish; and then drags one of the chairs over so that he can park himself directly across from Roy and start flattening the papers.  “So—the thing.  Mission.  Trip.  With Robertson.”

It takes Roy a moment to remember that Robertson was the name of the alchemist Ed apprehended.  Up until the conclusion of that moment, he is suffused with a strange, stark, and _terrifyingly_ potent jealousy of some imaginary person named Robertson, with whom Ed went on a trip somewhere.

What the hell?

He doesn’t care what Ed does, with whom, for what reason—doesn’t care or wonder or want to know what Ed would look like, with all the defensive anger coaxed out of him and gently released; doesn’t care how it would feel to see him sprawled out late at night or in the rosy hush of morning, with his hair spilt across the pillow like honey and his shoulders relaxed and his eyelashes grazing his cheeks—

He doesn’t even want to think about it, in fact, because Ed is his _employee_ , and that’s it; that’s all; that’s all either of them aspires to.

Isn’t it?

Roy grabs on to the sturdiest-looking thread in his fraying brain and tugs as hard as he dares.  “You were researching Robertson?”

Ed looks at him like he fell off the turnip truck, which… for once, unprecedentedly at that, he may merit.

“Not him personally,” Ed says, sifting through the papers, presumably to avoid having to continue staring at Roy, who is evidently a cretin.  “He’s boring.  But what he was working on—”

“Overlaid arrays,” Roy says.  “It was in your report.”

Ed glances up at him again.  “You did read it.”

“I always read them,” Roy says.

“Then I owe a lot of people money,” Ed says, focusing on his offerings again.  “Point is—couple people have done overlapping, and his strategy was a little different, y’know.  Instead something like what Kimblee did—” Echoes of chaos; distant screams.  “—where you have to fit the two pieces directly on top of each other in the same configuration every time, what Robertson was lookin’ at was more like… multiple permutations all tweaking the purpose of the base array a little bit.”  He’s sorting through the pages so fast that Roy can’t even make out the scribbled notes on most of them.  One surfaces, and he smacks his metal hand down on top of it to pin it in place, which summons a hollow sound from the wood of Roy’s desktop.  “He was mostly into rotating stuff—kinda like if you had one primary fixed piece on your clock, and the gear right above that made it do something different every time it turned, I guess?  You can kinda see what I mean—” A profusion of sketches passes in front of Roy’s eyes and then disappears back into the pile.  “—but what _I'm_ interested in is… intersecting arrays.  Like—could you make some sort of a chain reaction out of them?  Sort of like this, plus alkahestry, plus a little bit of not giving a single fuck.  Could you activate one array, and then trigger the next array that overlaps just a _tiny_ bit with that one, and then hit the next one, and create this cascade of different effects as it evolves further on up the line?”

A diagram whizzes out of the mass of sheets and settles itself in front of Roy.  One quick, clever hand—the softer one—sweeps across to settle it and then retreats.

“Ed,” Roy says, and his voice sounds slightly faint to his own ears, “I know you hear this a lot, but I wouldn’t say it lightly.”

The suspicion radiates so intensely that he doesn’t even need to hear it solidifying in the inevitable “Say what?”

“You’re a genius,” Roy says.

Ed snorts.  “Not if it sucks.”

A part of Roy wants to compliment the succinctness of that philosophical gem; and a part of him wants to remind Ed that nothing Ed has ever done in the realm of alchemical endeavor has been mediocre, _including_ the abomination; but the bulk of him is so preoccupied with his first instinct of saying _You never suck, or at least not in the bad way_ to Ed that it tongue-ties all of the rest of him.

He shouldn’t let himself get preoccupied with his own tongue, here, either.

In a last-ditch attempt to distract himself from the opportunity to wander any further along that line of thought—this particular sort of desperation is getting to feel worryingly familiar—he starts digging through the foregrounded collection of doodles and notes.

“Genius,” he says, “is a semi-permanent state of being, and as such is not contingent on output or… _oh_.”

Sometimes, he forgets, and he lets his guard down, and he has no one else to blame.

Ed is inspiration incarnate.  Ed is the only person who can remind him, in a life after Ishval, what alchemy was, once, and what it ought to be.  Ed is the only one who kindles in him the first flame he ever burnt his fingers on—sheer, pure, giddy curiosity.  Ed is the only one who can reignite the thrill of a theory, the thorough satisfaction of methodical experimentation, the knee-weakening delight of stretching towards a discovery _just_ out of reach—

Alchemy was born out of selfishness and greed—out of the dream of cheating death.  Ed is the only person Roy has ever met who has made it into something entirely different.  Ed _builds_.  He creates.  He changes.  It would never even occur to him to employ his incomparable power for personal gain.

Alchemy has always been tainted, but it has always had the potential to be beautiful in the right hands.

Ed’s are perfect.

Sometimes, Roy is fool enough to forget, and then something like this touches down on the desk before him.

The two arrays sketched out on the page before him intersect at one… well, obviously not a corner, given that they’re circular; but one of the angles that punctures the circumference of the first array becomes a triangle at the edge of the second—the outer rings won’t interfere with one another, but the way the shared lines feed into a different part of the next array—

“You might want to give it…” His impulse is to run his fingertips over the surface, but it’s drawn in pencil—that may be a first; he’s wondered in the past if Ed even _owns_ one, or if it’s just that leaving ink blots and drippy scribbles all over the reports is much more fun—and it always feels a bit… intimate… to touch another alchemist’s work.  “A segue.  That’s not the word I want, but—something to guide the energy more directly—”

He snatches a pencil out of the cup on his desk, lowers it nearly to the paper, hesitates, glances up—

Ed’s grin answers everything he hasn’t asked.  “Go for it.”

Roy feels—

There isn’t time for what he feels.

He spins the pencil once over the knuckle of his first finger, scanning the sigils already in place.  “Net or axe?”

“Net,” Ed says.  “Good idea.”

Roy glances up at him again, but there’s no mockery in it—nothing but a familiar, wholehearted fascination.

Ed grins at his surprise, which at least is a touch more ordinary, as far as their interactions are concerned.  “What?  Get in there.  Let’s see what you’re made of, Mustang.”

“Sugar and spice and everything nice,” Roy says.  “Haven’t you been paying attention?”

“Spice I’ll believe,” Ed says.  “Cayenne, probably.  You ever gotten cayenne up your nose?”

“ _No_ ,” Roy says.  “But since it sounds like you’re speaking from experience, do tell—how exactly does one manage—”

“Just draw,” Ed says.

So Roy does—slowly at first, in fits and starts he tries to streamline so that Ed won’t recognize just how much of the tentativeness has its roots in trepidation that he’ll foul it up.  It’s been so long since he threw caution to the winds and let alchemy be _fun_ that he barely remembers…

How sublime it can be when the lines pour out of you, and the sigils slide out onto the page, and it all fits together and settles in and makes _sense_ —

 “Expansion,” he mutters, more to himself than to be listened to.  Ed’s first array was an unspecific sort of a dias—a base for something; an open-ended opportunity to construct.  Paper?  They can use paper; Ed put in a hint of wood, but he didn’t limit their options.  Roy would love to remodel the carpet, but he doesn’t imagine either Riza or the powers that be here in Central Command would smile on his architectural choices.  “Do you think—”

“Yeah,” Ed says, sounding—breathless?  He darts around the corner of the desk, and then he’s hovering at Roy’s elbow, grabbing another pencil out of the cup— “Hang on, make it—no, you got it.  Keep going.”

On any other night, he could say _Excuse me, Major, since when do I take orders from you?_ ; and then they could have a good, albeit sardonic, little laugh about how crap the both of them are at taking orders; and later Roy could indulge some very, very private thoughts about other scenarios in which orders might be given and obeyed, and then pretend he hadn’t.

Tonight, the most that he can do is breathe out, “All right.”

Ed trusted him with this.  Ed _en_ trusted him with this—with a streak of brilliance that could carry them in heretofore unprecedented directions; with something so beautifully, spectacularly _not necessary_ but somehow all the more exciting for it; with something composed entirely of possibility with no trace of intention, no plan, no purpose, no ending point.  He doesn’t have to accomplish anything.  All he has to do is create.  Imagine.  Explore.

He sketches out a third array, and then a bubble of faint laughter—of an attempt to articulate something that can only be called delight—makes its way out of Ed, and he’s leaning over Roy’s arm and scribbling out the start of the next one.

“Hey,” Roy says, but Ed’s so damn fast at this that he’s nearly finished by the time Roy’s even managed to elbow his arm properly.  “Don’t hog the alchemical thought experiment.”

“It’s not a thought experiment,” Ed says without so much as a shudder in the next sweeping stroke.  “We’re gonna do it.”

Roy elbows a tiny bit harder.  “Don’t hog the alchemical action experiment.”

Ed elbows back.  Fortunately, stealing Roy’s thunder required reaching over with his left hand, which means that that’s the arm he elbowed with.  Roy’s already-miserable ribcage appreciates that small mercy.  “It’s my idea.  I’ll hog it if I want to.”

Roy puts his shoulder against Ed’s, grabbing for Ed’s wrist.  He’s not sure who he is, just now, but he knows that there’s a laugh climbing up his throat with tiny, tickling claws.  “I know you’re a farm boy, but you’re not supposed to take your etiquette cues from the pigs, Edward—”

“Get bent, city slicker,” Ed says, but Roy can hear that he’s seconds shy of laughing, too, regardless of how hard he’s pushing back.  “You wouldn’t last five minutes out there; have you ever even _seen_ a cow?”

Roy watches Ed’s wrist instead of the gleam of his eyes, spots the pattern in the writhing, snaps out his hand, catches it, and pins it to the desk.  “Have you ever seen one from above?”

“’Course I have,” Ed says.  “You think we don’t have ladders on a _farm_?”

The laugh breaks out of Roy’s chest before he has a chance to stop it, and the throb of renewed pain in the damned rib throws his concentration further still, and then Ed has wrenched his wrist free and snatched up the pencil again.

Roy has to give him this one: he sits back and lets Ed scrawl out the rest of the array.  This week continues to defy explanation: he has never heard Ed make a short joke about _himself_.  “Where did that come from?”

“My back pocket,” Ed says, finishing with a bit of extra finesse.  “Always keep your adversary’s signature move in mind.”

“There was a time I couldn’t have imagined you saying something like that,” Roy says.  “Either of the things you just said.”

“Times change,” Ed says.  He turns the pencil towards Roy, arching an eyebrow and a smile.  “And people do.”

Roy takes the pencil and spins it over his knuckle again.  “And alchemy does, at least when you get your hands on it.”

“Less chatting, more cleverness,” Ed says, nodding towards the paper, but the smile hasn’t faded yet.

Roy glances over Ed’s most recent additions.  “Can’t I multitask?”

“According to Lieutenant Hawkeye,” Ed says, “definitely not.”

“Lies, slander, and insubordination,” Roy says.  He leans in closer to the paper to add a few fiddly little sigils that will give this thing a touch of flair.  “And rudeness.  Remarkably rude.  If my life didn’t depend on her, she’d be fired.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, calmly.  “Just like everybody else who’s ever given you shit.”

“Precisely,” Roy says.  Splitting his concentration between the banter and the artistry is a challenge he’s up to, which incidentally proves his point; but it does require biting his lip a bit.  “You, for instance.  I’m fairly sure I fired you a long time ago.  I don’t know who keeps letting you in, let alone who keeps you on the payroll.”

“Lieutenant Hawkeye, probably,” Ed says.

“That explains everything,” Roy says.  “What a diabolical conspiracy.”  He finishes up and holds out the pencil.  “Here.”

“Thanks,” Ed says, taking it, and their fingers brush, because of course they do; of course nothing can ever be tame, or simple, or straightforward for either of them.  “I’ve always wanted to be diabolical.”

“No, you haven’t,” Roy says, watching the lines pour out from under the tip of the pencil like they’re pulling Ed’s hand across the page—like they _want_ to be there; like they could never have had any other purpose.

“Nah,” Ed says.  “I haven’t.  Sure is fun to say, though.”  No one whose penmanship is such an affront to eyeballs should be able to draw arrays—or anything—like this.  Every last curve is so smooth; every sigil outlined in effortless perfection— “Think we’re just about done.”

Ed is, of course, a genius, and that’s the likeliest answer to the question, but as a certified glutton for punishment, Roy asks anyway: “How do you know?”

“’Cause I’m getting bored,” Ed says, “and I want to find out what happens.”

Roy looks at him.

Ed grins back.

They are _much_ too close.  Ed missed a little spot shaving—a tiny patch of prickling gold stubble just underneath his jawline on the right side.  The gold of his eyes looks so much darker indoors.  His eyelashes are so thick you could get lost in them and never find your way out.

“Paper,” Roy says.

Ed blinks.

Roy twists sideways, peeling himself out of the spell—the ensorcellment, the _thrall_ —and collects the stack of blank or unnecessary sheets of copy paper perched on the edge of his desk, waiting for notes or doodles or an eventual grisly meeting with the industrial shredder downstairs.  He makes it up and out of his chair and over to the center of the floor in front of his desk without his knees betraying the double-quick flitter of his heart, which he considers something of a coup.  He knows a coup when he sees one, which is more than can be said for quite a bit of this country.

He lays the pile down like a sacrifice, or perhaps like kindling, and then Ed’s opposite him again, settling their collaborative handiwork crisply on top.

Ed extends his left hand and moves to lay it on the page.

The thought shimmers into focus in Roy’s head with just a split-second to spare—he grabs Ed’s wrist instants before Ed’s fingertips make contact with the array, and he holds it just out of reach.

_Again_.

What a damn night.

“How do you know this is going to work?” he asks.

“I don’t,” Ed says, wriggling his fingers for a second and then scowling up at Roy.  He hauls back on his captured hand, but this is not Roy Mustang’s first rodeo, and his grip holds.  “That’s the whole point of trying it.  That’s the whole point of _science_.”

Roy holds on a little tighter and tries very hard not to notice that he can feel Ed’s pulse beating swiftly in the captured wrist.  “How do you know it’s safe?”

“I _don’t_ ,” Ed says.  “It’s probably not.  You think anybody’s ever learned anything that mattered from something that they knew was safe?  Worst-case scenario, we blow up your office and possibly ourselves, and not only do we not have to go to work tomorrow, we go down in history as epic motherfuckers who died doing something _wicked_ cool.”

Ed’s heart ticks off little beats in succession against the pad of Roy’s thumb like a tiny sparrow batting its wings.

“How much coffee have you had today?” Roy asks.

“Either too much, or almost enough,” Ed says.  “ _C’mon_ , Roy.  Live a little.  Trust me.  Don’t you want to know?”

Roy wants to know a lot of things.  He wants to know how much longer, how much further, how much _more_ it’s going to take.  He wants to know if he even has it in him to make it—if it’s even worth the daily, hourly, minute-at-a-time grind he drags himself through most days.  He wants to know if it’s ever going to get easier.  He wants to know if it’s ever going to matter that he tries.

He wants to know if he’s the only one feeling electricity before they’ve activated a single one of the arrays.  He wants to know if the lousy lights in this too-familiar office have ever settled as warmly and beautifully on someone’s skin as they have on Ed’s right now.  He wants to know if Ed’s always looked like home and temptation.  He wants to know if he’s experiencing some sort of cardiac malfunction, and if this is the fault of some Xerxesian magic far more diabolical than anything in Ed’s wildest, most benevolent dreams.

He wants to know if Ed’s ever dreamed of _him_.

He wants to know—

—what’s going to happen when Ed puts his hand down on the lines they drew together.

Roy releases a breath and then his grip.

“Yes,” he says.

Ed eyes him for a second, making sure he’s really withdrawing his hands to stay out of the way this time.

Then Ed smacks both palms down on the first of their arrays.

Nothing happens.

Ed’s face falls—so fast, to such crumpled devastation, that Roy’s heart goes right with it.

He shifts to reach out and opens his mouth to speak.

The lines light up turquoise.

But the first circle isn’t the moment of truth—the transfer is.  Any alchemist can activate one transmutation; any alchemist can close a loop and pour some energy in through it—

He realizes too late that he and Ed have both leant in to stare expectantly at the place where the second circle intersects, as if they can simply _will_ it to work; as if their proximity might encourage cooperation.  As if the universe has ever been charitable to either of them; as if—

As if tonight might be different.

As if this moment might be significant, and things might _change_.

The net Roy sketched out to bridge the first circle through to the second illuminates.

The light hums at an audible frequency, at least when you’ve bent this close, and held your breath, and let yourself hope _this_ hard—

It swings around the circumference of the first array, and the lines that move continuously into the second slowly, but undeniably, start to feed the light upward, across the boundary line of the initial circle and on into the next.

“Holy shit,” Ed breathes, and the corners of the papers underneath the arrays start to rustle— “Roy, holy _shit_ —”

The light bleeds outward—inward, onward, upward, _forward_ —and fills the second transmutation circle, and the paper starts to churn.

Ed scrambles, and the shadows dance around him, and then his left shoulder collides with Roy’s, and in reaching out to steady him, somehow—

Somehow Roy ends up with his right hand hands wrapped around Ed’s left one, or at least that’s what it feels like; he can’t takes his eyes off of the linked arrays _igniting_ one another right along the line.  Ed clings on, and the corners of the papers rattle, and ripple, and their edges liquify and twist into the coalescing spear of light at the center of the ever-expanding transmutation—

And what emerges from the spitting, searing, ozone-melting beam looks… abstract, to put it nicely.  A few somewhat less-than-careful horticulture-related sigils scattered throughout the assortment of arrays has produced a vaguely plant-shaped paper-pulp sculpture-thing that would look much more at home in an avant-garde museum than it does in the middle of the carpet in Roy’s office.

But what matters is—

“It _worked_ ,” Ed gasps out, and then he’s laughing, and rocking back on his heels, and he hasn’t let go of Roy’s hand— “I can’t fucking believe—it’s _useless_ , but we could find something; we could do—shit, I don’t know; we could do anything we _wanted_ , Mustang, ’cause it fucking _works_ —”

His eyes look like embers, and his hair’s a mess, and Roy has to watch his own damn traitor of a left hand rise up and cup itself along the curve of Ed’s jaw, and that distracting little patch of missed stubble prickles at his palm, and he leans in and is lost.

Ed kisses him back.

It is, for several long, lingering, luxurious seconds, utterly transcendent.  It is soft and delicious; tentative and tremulous and then firmer and warmer and harder, with a hint of teeth—

It is an awakening.  It is a summons.  It is a reminder of what a kiss can be, should be; what one _means_ —

It is a physical expression of all of these tumbling possibilities that have tangled together too densely to be spun out in words.  It’s the vast mess of feelings put in motion; it’s the articulation of the full scope of highs and lows and indescribable ricochets that this week has encompassed—

It’s a question.  Isn’t it?  Not a promise.

Ed kisses the same way that he does everything else—with his whole body, with a fervency that verges on violence.  He hurls himself into it heart-first, as if the world can’t hurt him if he bowls it over with the sheer ferocity of his approach.  Distantly, Roy begins to register sensations other than the hot slide of Ed’s mouth over his—the fingers curled in his collar; the whisper of Ed’s breath against his cheek; the silky wealth of Ed’s hair around his knuckles; the skittering beat of his pulse in his fingertips and the almost-coordinated rhythm in the soft skin underneath Ed’s jaw—

It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

It wasn’t supposed to be this _much_.

It wasn’t supposed to feel balanced, wasn’t supposed to feel fireplace-warm and firework-bright—

It wasn’t supposed to engulf him, and enclose him, and tighten until he’s not sure how to breathe, but he feels—

Safe.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.  It wasn’t supposed to _work_.

Roy draws back, hearing his breath leave him in a giddy rush, and opens his eyes.  Extracting his hand from Ed’s hair is… torment, really.

Ed’s eyelashes rise slowly.  The wells of his pupils have almost swallowed the ring of honey-gold, but they fix on Roy without an instant’s hesitation.

Roy searches for some remnant of his voice.

“I’m sorry,” he manages.

“For what?” Ed asks.  His eyes start to narrow, and the dream-soft quality dissipates out of his voice.  “What do you want?”

Roy doesn’t dare to clear his throat.  This is his fault.  “I don’t… kn—”

“Like _hell_ you don’t,” Ed says.  “You make it your business to know everything about everybody, usually before they know it about themselves.  What do you _want_?”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Roy says.

He knows even before the fury twists across Ed’s face that it’s far too late.

“Bullshit you don’t,” Ed says.  He’s up on his feet; he’s halfway to the door— “You just don’t want to risk hurting yourself.”

Ed’s hand has landed on the doorknob by the time Roy makes it upright.  “That’s—”

Not true?  Not fair?

Not quite cruel enough?

“Ed,” he says.  “Don’t—”

Ed slams the door.

And then the outer door.

Roy supposes he deserves that.

  


* * *

  


Roy has always been self-destructive, but he’s never been stupid.  Dwelling on it alone won’t take him anywhere he hasn’t already visited while staring at the ceiling the last several nights, and it would be lovely to get a _tiny_ bit of sleep.

As soon as he’s made it home and pretended to care about the concept of dinner, he steps into his entryway and dials.

“Hello?” Riza says.

“I can’t believe you abandoned me,” Roy says.

The pause lasts long enough that even with several miles between them and only the faintly staticky phone line to go on, he can imagine her facial expression in tremendous detail.

“You seemed to be occupied,” she says.

“You are the worst best friend in the entire world,” he says.

“At last,” she says.  “I can retire knowing I’ve achieved all of the highest accolades.  What happened?”

At least she’s not asking _How did you ruin it?_ , which would be just as apt.

  


* * *

  


Ed spends the entire day on Friday in the office, plugging away at reports on a typewriter acquired from some mysterious source who apparently didn’t hear about the first typewriter incident.  There are a handful of possible explanations for this particular phenomenon—Roy’s frontrunners are a dogged attempt to prove that Roy’s actions haven’t affected him enough to chase him away; a determined effort to demonstrate that his value as an employee is greater than ever; or a deliberate intention to get under Roy’s skin as much as possible as a very minor sort of revenge.  The likeliest scenario, Roy knows, is a combination of the three.

It’s just as well.  Frankly, if Ed broke into his house and filled his toothpaste tube with shaving cream, he wouldn’t have it in him to do much more than shrug and say, _Well, he_ was _provoked_.

Strangely enough, the ongoing agony seems to propel the day along significantly faster, which marks one thing he can be unreservedly grateful for.  If he can get through this part, an inadvisedly large basket of cheesy fries awaits: he can smother his feelings in gooey caloric goodness, drink a bit more than he ought to, and crash out early and full of a fitting amount of self-loathing.  But also full of cheesy fries.  Which is worlds better than the self-loathing on its own.

At least no one has asked about the bizarre, oddly almost-floral paper structure grazing the ceiling of his office where he shoved it into the corner of the room.  It stings a little that everyone has glanced over at it, visibly weighed their options, and then elected not to ask—which implies, rather strongly, that they think he made the choice of décor willingly, which in turn implies that they all think he has unbelievably bad taste.  He’s always been a touch eccentric, certainly, but he’s not _tacky_.  Well—not _that_ tacky.  Well—

He just didn’t have the heart to get rid of it, is all.

This day can’t end soon enough.

Because this is, after all, his life, at fifteen minutes to five, Fuery says, resonantly cheerfully, “You’re coming with us to the Lion tonight, aren’t you, Ed?”

Perfect.  Delightful.  There is nothing in the vast universe more dignified than inducing a self-imposed fry coma in front of your soulmate in a desperate attempt to drown your own innumerable indiscretions in cheese.

“Uh,” Ed says.  “I… was… gonna… go home and… read.  I think.  But—”

“Aww,” Havoc says.  “C’mon, boss!  I think we saw you less this week than we did the week you were on the mission!”

“On a minute-by-minute basis,” Falman says, “that’s extremely impl—”

“Least you can do is hang out long enough to give us the play-by-play on everybody you beat the crap out of while you were out there,” Breda says.  “That’s always the highlight of _my_ week.”

Little do they know.

“I dunno,” Ed says.  “Al was kinda lonely when I was gone, and—”

“Bring him, too!” Havoc says.  “Give him a call!”

“Your first basket of fries is on me,” Breda says.

“Well, _jeez_ ,” Ed says.  “Why didn’t you say so?”

Perhaps Roy will just shovel cheesy fries into his mouth until he ignominiously expires.

That sounds like a plan.

  


* * *

  


The cheesy fries are not coming fast enough: the awkwardness is going to kill Roy long before the cholesterol ever gets a chance.

Bless him, Fuery keeps trying to start conversations, but by some intolerable side effect of the large-group shuffle, Roy and Ed ended up sitting side-by-side in their booth.  Ed has shifted as far as possible to the outer edge of the bench seat, and Roy is trying to stay as still as humanly possible in the likely-doomed hope that he may simply cease to register in anyone’s vision.

“So, um,” Fuery says to Ed.  “Lots of research this week.  Can you tell us what you’re working on?  Or would you have to kill us?”

“I dunno,” Ed says, looking staunchly at the tabletop.  He has his hands folded tightly in his lap—underneath the table; even right beside him, Roy barely has the angle to see.  “I don’t want to waste your time.  It was sort of an… interesting… idea, I guess, in theory, but it’s just theory.  It’s not good for anything.  And it’d take a long time to explain.  Last thing I wanna do is bore you guys with something that’s completely useless.”

“Nothing you’ve ever done in your life has been useless,” Roy says.

He… shit.  Yes, that really just… he said that.  Damn.

Accordingly, he deserves the stares he’s getting from all around the table, not that deserving it is any sort of consolation prize.

If there’s one thing he’s learned from the brass—well, if there’s one thing he’s learned from the brass other than that _might makes right_ turns out to be true an immensely discouraging amount of the time—it’s that sometimes, doubling down on the stupid thing you just said can gradually convince a few people that it wasn’t as stupid as it sounded at first.

“If anything,” he says, “it’s _too_ useful—what you’ve changed is so open-ended that it could be applied to a thousand different things.  Narrowing it down to the good ones is going to be the difficult part.  You could—a transmutation in specific stages like that could be used for distributing medicine in progressive doses.  Or it could be set up to complete phases of construction or demolition that are unsafe for people, since it could be activated and left unattended.  Or it could be used for cooking, or for automating _any_ kind of process—what you’ve made is functionally an alchemic assembly line; you could build cars, or telephones, or radios, or— _anything_.  You kicked open a door the likes of which no one in this field has ever even looked through.”

He doesn’t say the other things—doesn’t say _It would be a perfect detonator.  You could use it as a time bomb; you could use it as a grenade_.  Ed doesn’t need a reminder of what Roy really is, underneath.

Ed’s hands have tightened around each other so much that even just the glimpse Roy has of them betrays white knuckles and straining steel.

“Whatever,” Ed says, voice low, gaze still glued to the table.  “It’s not a big deal.”

Roy should shut his mouth and put his head down and pretend he never spoke.

But all of these emotions are… unfamiliar.  Disbelief throws his balance, and the half-submerged hurt wrests away the last of his control.

“What are you talking about?” he asks, and it comes out far too aggressive, but it’s too late— “It’s _revolutionary_ , Ed.  This is a combination of novelty and ingenuity like the world has never seen, on top of which it’s endlessly marketable, and you could keep repurposing it for the rest of your life.  It’s the perfect opportunity to build something brand-new—the perfect alternative to all of…” He finds himself waving his hand vaguely towards himself, but he means more than that.  He means the whole of it.  Ed’s not looking at him anyway.  “…this.  The military, the—” Misery.  “—backlash, the uphill battles.  You could finally get out from under my thumb, anyway, and play to your own strengths without someone holding you back, for once, and just—change the world.  Change everything.  You could help so many people, and you’d never have to put up with any of the military bureaucracy or any of my personal bullshit ever again.  Isn’t that what you want?”

That makes Ed look at him.

But it’s not a look of dawning revelation, betraying the discovery that Roy’s insights have resonated in some fundamental part of his being.

Ed looks tired, and angry, and disappointed.

He looks sad.

“All right,” Riza says, getting up from the other side of the table.  “That’s it.  Come on.”

At least Roy and Ed can apparently agree on one thing tonight, which is staring at Riza in bewilderment.

“Both of you,” she says.  She gestures sharply, and Ed hops up off of the bench seat and scuttles three steps in the direction she indicated while she reaches for Roy’s arm.  “Now.”

He lets her drag him off of the seat and up to his feet, more because he’s been stunned into compliance than anything else.  “What?  Why?”

“You know why,” she says, which is absurd, because he wouldn’t have asked it in such a colossally stupid voice if he’d had the slightest idea, but since he’s already concerned about the circulation in his arm past where she’s gripped it, it seems safer not to argue.

She latches on to Ed’s left shoulder with her other hand and marches them both down the hall towards… the restrooms?  Roy tries to remember if he said anything obscene enough to merit having his mouth washed out with soap; his track record’s hazy, but he certainly doesn’t recall _Ed_ saying anything objectionable tonight, which has to be a first—

At the last second, Riza wrenches them all into a sharp left turn, steering them down the corridor to what appears to be an emergency exit door.  She shoulders her way through it, hauling them both outside with her into an extremely unappealing backalley, finally releases them, and then steps up into the doorway, folding her arms across her chest.

“You can come back in when you’ve sorted this out,” she says.  “Not a _minute_ before.”

Roy finds that he preferred the strange humiliation of their inexplicable journey through the pub to the rush of ice-cold adrenaline seeping through him now.

Fool that he is, he opens his mouth, and what comes out is, “Are you going to eat all my fries?”

“Yes,” Riza says, and then she slams the door.

They stand in silence for a long moment, which makes it easier to hear the very final scraping sound of a deadbolt sliding into place.

Ed swallows, looking at the door, and sets his jaw.  “You think she’s going to stand there and listen?”

“No,” Roy says.  “I think she’s going to go eat my fries.”

Ed presses his palms together, and the first soft blue sparks start to percolate around his hands.  “Well, if this doesn’t work, we can always just walk around to the front door anyway.”

Roy takes a deep breath.  “Ed.”

The sparks flicker out.  Ed rounds on him, eyes narrowed.  “What?”

“You know what,” Roy says.  At least when he says it, it’s _true_.

“There’s nothing to ‘sort out’,” Ed says, and Roy has never seen anyone shrug with such enthusiasm.  “It’s—fine.  I get it.  And it’s—I just forgot, before, that it’s… I’ve had a lot longer to think about it than you have.  You’ve known less than a _week_.  That’s—I mean, it took me a really long time to—get used to it.  And it’s fine.  It’s your prerogative.  It’s… it just _is_ ; it just _exists_ ; nowhere does it say you have to want it, or accept it, let alone act on it, or—anything like that.  And I just—” He pushes his left hand up into his hair and waves at the gulf of space between them with the right.  “I forgot.  I forgot what it was like at first.  At first I was so _mad_ , just about the whole concept—the whole idea that it’d been decided for me.  I’d finally paid off so many of the old debts, and then I got _this_ , and the universe had already written down the one thing I’d always counted on being able to choose for myself.”

There’s never any choice.

Roy wants to tell him, but what difference would it make?

“Ed,” he says.

“But I had time,” Ed says, tangling his fingers up in his own ponytail and then dragging them free.  “That’s the thing I keep forgetting.  I had time to read all the books, and stew about it, and get told a hundred times by the horrible hopeless romantic that they gave me instead of a brother that denial has never moved a single mountain, and—just—you know.  Come to terms with it.  And start to flip it over, too, because it’s… on the other face of the thing, if it’s decided for you, then… you can’t… fuck it up.  No matter what.  Right?  Theoretically.  If it’s set in stone before you ever got there, then it doesn’t matter who you are, or how you act, or what you do—it’s there.  It’s carved in.  Can’t take it back.”

Everything… aches.  Roy’s right shoulder; the rib; the full breadth of the inside surface of his skull; his throat; his hands; his heart.

“But of course you’re right,” Ed says, hiking up both shoulders and putting his hands into his pockets this time.  “Savor that, by the way, ’cause I’m not planning to say it again for a long damn time, but—it’s not like that.  It doesn’t _mean_ anything, doesn’t change anything, doesn’t alter a single moving piece in the machine of the universe.  Just… is.  Take it or leave it.  And it’s your right to leave it.  I was just—mad that I hadn’t even thought about that.  I hate not bein’ logical; I hate it when stuff catches me by surprise.  But it makes sense.  There isn’t any rulebook for this; there aren’t any formulas.  And it’s completely within your rights not to want… me.  It.  This.”  He swallows, shakes his head.  “But it’s okay.  I mean it.  That’s how it goes—that’s life.  Life’s what’s left when your plan doesn’t work out like you thought it would.  Life’s who you are when you’re too damn tired for pretending.  And…”

He lets his breath out slowly, tilting his head back, and gazes skyward.

“I don’t want to pretend with you,” he says.  “There’s no point.  You know me.  And I know you.  And I think that’s… enough.”

_You are so much more than ‘enough’,_ Roy thinks so hard that it trembles on his tongue.  _But I couldn’t bear to cage you; don’t you understand—?_

“When you slammed your finger in that drawer,” Ed says.  He rocks back on his heels without ever once prying his eyes away from the stars.  “That was what proved it, but it wasn’t the first time I wondered.  Wasn’t the first inkling I got.  There was a time a couple weeks before that, when we were here—” He jerks his head towards the building beside them, and the ponytail swings up and undulates behind him, and Roy’s stomach drops.  “You were sitting by yourself, and you were looking at all of us messing around and having fun and stealing fries and stuff, and in that second, I just _knew_ what you were feeling.  You were thinking about how much all of us cared about you, and about what you had to do, and you were thinking that you didn’t deserve any of us, and you wished we’d just _go_.  Go and be happy or something; go and stop suffering and belong somewhere else.  And I felt it.  I felt your fucking heart breaking with it.  And I just—”

“Came over,” Roy says.  His mouth feels numb; his head buzzes, rattles—half-empty beehive; tin can of marbles— “Gave me your fries.  Told me my hair looked extra stupid today, and that deserved some kind of a prize.  Sat with me and iterated half of Al’s ‘Stupid Jokes Collection’, and when you ran out of those, pointed to several random people at the bar and made up detailed back-stories to explain their fashion choices.  Offered to make me a really ‘sick-ass’ pen for the office to make the paperwork less onerous.  Asked me if I’d ever gone bowling.  Asked me if I’d ever been to a carnival.  Asked me if I was going to finish the fries.”

Ed is looking at him again—like he’s worth the same amount of wonderment as the constellations.

“It is inconceivable to me,” Roy says, “that you don’t think you _matter_.”

Ed quirks a smile.  “C’mon.  Don’t get all soppy on me now.  We’re all just chopped-up carbon that stumbled onto sentience.  You know that better than most people.”

“You’re not,” Roy says.  “You never have been.  You’re stardust turned steel, Ed.  What I know better than most people is that none of us can ever even dream of meeting you halfway.”

Ed swallows, and breathes, and clenches and unclenches his fists at his sides.

His wets his lips, and his voice shakes when he speaks.  “You said you didn’t want it.”

Roy is going to give ardently not moving one more shot.  “I never said that.”

Ed’s eyes widen, and then they narrow, and he takes a half-step forward, mouth twisting up into a scowl.  “You said—”

“That we shouldn’t act on it,” Roy says.  “That we should try to find a way around it.  That if it wasn’t ruining your life already, perhaps just—setting it aside would stop it from making things any worse.”

“You’re not some kind of fucking plague, Mustang,” Ed says.  He finishes the first step, takes another— “Not even a particularly virulent virus, actually, and if you think I can’t fucking handle you at your worst—”

“You don’t know the worst,” Roy says.

Ed moves one step closer.  “Yes, I _do_.”

Roy stands his ground, squares his shoulders, and lifts his chin.  “You don’t.  And you shouldn’t have to find out the hard way just because some—bizarre remnant of a lost culture’s mythos bound us up togethe—”

“Fuck you,” Ed says.  “That’s the whole _point_ , don’t you get it?”

Roy eyes him.  “The point is giving up on science?”

Ed shoves both hands into his hair this time, and Roy can’t help wincing at the prospect of the metal knuckles catching in it everywhere, but Ed doesn’t give him much time to worry about it.  “ _No_ , you _idiot_ ; the point is—I get you.  Okay?  I _get_ you, in this—deep, fundamental, bones-and-blood-and-guts sort of a way, like—the same way I _get_ alchemy.  The same way I get _Al_.  Like it’s just a fact, and there’s nothing I can do about it, or you can do about it, and we can’t kill it, and we can’t run from it, because it’s _there_ , and we’re stuck with it whether we do anything with it or not.  It’s some fucking part of who I am now.  Okay?  So—so get fucked with all your stupid, self-sacrificing—whatever you’re trying to sell this time, and—”

“Ed,” Roy says.  “What do _you_ want?”

Ed breathes out.  Then he cringes, extracts both hands from his hair—the right with considerable difficulty—and lays both over his injured rib for a second.

“You,” he says.

Roy’s heart stops.

“To stop hassling me,” Ed says.

“Ah,” Roy manages with some lingering vestige of a forgotten breath.  Roll with the punches.  Get back up.  Dust yourself off; keep walking.  Someone very important taught him that.  “Well, that’s simple enough.  I suppose I had better order a whole new basket of fries, since there’s very little chance that any of mine survived in our abse—”

“Shut up,” Ed says, and his voice shakes.

They’re still too close—close enough that even when Ed ducks his head, and works his jaw, and swallows twice, Roy can detect the extra glimmer in his eyes.  Close enough that neither his hair nor the dark hides it the way he likely hopes.

“If you ever—” Ed’s voice quavers harder this time.  He sets his shoulders and grinds his teeth.  “You know.  If you ever—change your mind—then—it’s… there, I guess.  For whatever that’s worth.”

Roy needs to stop trusting his unattended psyche, which, when he freezes, says things like “It’s worth a hell of a lot more than I am” without any sort of approval from the top.

A breath shudders in and then back out of Ed.  His hair flutters.  “One of these days, I am gonna kick your _ass_ for all this pithy self-defeating nonsense crap.”

“Given the circumstances,” Roy says, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

Ed turns a baleful eye on him.  “You know what?  No day like today.  I’m gonna give you five seconds to run.”

“Ed,” Roy says.

“Four,” Ed says.

“Don’t make me say it,” Roy says.

“Three,” Ed says.

“Please,” Roy says, and that one scalds on its way up.  “I don’t—it’s—difficult.  It’s always difficult.  It never goes the way—”

“Two,” Ed says.

“Damn it,” Roy says.

At least Ed having parted his lips to say _One_ makes it easier to drink some tiny fraction of the passion seething off of him.

It’s almost more of a concession than a kiss, but somehow Roy feels… warm.  Light.  And the tingling in his extremities doesn’t feel like more of Ed’s phantom pain.

Trust Ed to make him question his own nerve sensations—trust Ed to make him question everything.  Trust Ed to make this kiss feel like punishment, and then purgatory, and _then_ that softly-sparking uncertainty that brought them together before.  Trust Ed to make him feel weak and invigorated and dizzy and delighted all at once.  Trust Ed to take him out at the knees and drag his heart up out of the darkness simultaneously.  Trust Ed to greet him first with an unsettling amount of teeth—trust Ed to make him earn the gentleness; trust Ed to make him wait to be rewarded with the cautious slide of mouths, and then a sweeter hunger, and then a tantalizing sweep of tongues.

_Trust Ed_ is, he supposes, the bottom line.

He fought it.  He did.  He tried.

Ed draws back, and his eyelashes rise, but the steel fingers clenched in Roy’s shirtfront don’t budge.

“You absolute bastard,” he says.

“I know,” Roy says.

“I still want you to say it,” Ed says.

Roy attempts at a dazzling smile, which is more than a bit of a trial when his stomach and his chest contain a profusion of disoriented butterflies.  “I just did.”

“ _No_ ,” Ed says.

“‘No’,” Roy says, and the grin is making his cheeks hurt, but he can’t seem to quell it, “is not an argument.”

Ed’s automail hand is shaking ever so slightly as he extracts it from the wrinkled mess he’s made of Roy’s shirt, but he curls it into a fist again and presses it against Roy’s chest—directly over his heart.

“Rain check,” he says.  “Pretty sure you’re familiar with that one.”

“Rings a bell,” Roy says.  There are benefits to surrender.  The privilege of sweeping Ed’s hair back from his face is among them.  “In the meantime—hello, gorgeous.  May I buy you a drink?”

Ed attempts to repurpose his smile into an expression of disapproval.  “Shut up.”

“Fair enough,” Roy says.  “May I shut up and buy you a drink?”

“That one sounds like a deal,” Ed says.

  


* * *

  


The ferocity of the ache in Roy’s right shoulder wakes him.

It is just long enough before the alarm is due to bounce his brain around his skull that he feels utterly robbed of the sleep he should be having, but the dull gray light and the pattering of the rain on the roof and against the windows seals his fate.  He’s up.  The shoulder’s _killing_ him.

Ed, of course, is still sleeping soundly beside him, which begs another iteration of an increasingly familiar question—where in the hell _is_ Ed’s threshold for pain?  Roy has made a concerted effort, over the past few months, to collect as many data points as possible, but that one still baffles him completely.  This whole situation remains infuriatingly unscientific, and he’s not much closer to determining the precise level of injury required for a shared experience than he was when this started.

Then again, debating the particulars with Ed has brought him to helpless laughter so many times now that he can hardly begrudge it anymore.

Sometimes the solution matters more than the explanation anyway; and often the solution is simple enough.

This morning, he draws the comforter down as smoothly as he can—garnering a little shiver, a little snuffle, and Ed burying his face even deeper in the pillow this time.  Once his breathing evens out again, Roy carefully guides all of the staggeringly beautiful gold hair across Ed’s back and tucks it safely over his left shoulder, baring the full expanse of the right.  Then Roy shifts back, reaches over to open the nightstand drawer, and retrieves one of the gloves laid out inside.

He settles on his knees and holds his bare hand out, palm hovering just above Ed’s spine, in case of any major movement—but he’s not planning to let the actual flames especially close.  All he needs from them is to heat the surrounding air, and then he can circulate that warmth anywhere he likes.

Such as, for instance, the immediate proximity of Ed’s aching automail port.

He snaps his fingers.

Heating the metal goes a long way all on its own, he finds, but there’s something delicately intimate about funneling the warm air across Ed’s skin to soothe the muscles where he carries all the worst of the tension.  If Roy can’t resist the impulse to nip one of the fingertips of the glove, haul it off, and reach down to smooth his hands over them next… 

Well, it’s hardly his fault.

“Mmn,” Ed says.  “What?”

“Good morning,” Roy says.  He presses the heel of his hand in against the join of Ed’s shoulder and his neck.  “That’s what.”

“’D be a better morning if you hadn’t woken me up early,” Ed mumbles.

“You were in pain,” Roy says.

“I was sleepin’,” Ed says, but he rolls over and reaches up to thread his softer set of fingers into Roy’s hair, and Roy is unreasonably jealous of the sleepy smile toying with his mouth.  “How ’bout apologizing by making me breakfast?”

“It’s not _that_ early,” Roy says.  Ed tugs gently on his hair, and he leans in to kiss Ed’s forehead.  “How’s coffee?”

Every one of Ed’s grins is a triumph, but he gives them away like they’re trivial.

It’s one of the things Roy loves about him—one of the things on a list so long now that it terrifies him when he stops to think.

“All right,” Ed says.  “Guess that’ll do.”

Morning breath be damned, Roy leans down to kiss him, in what may be a vain attempt to telegraph some of it—to impress some of the stories he hasn’t yet determined how to tell.

But he will.  He can.  For once, he has the time.

“Lovely,” he says, and Ed makes a face at him, but it only lasts a moment before it splits open into another smile—another triumph.  Roy’s had few enough of those.  “Coffee, then.”


End file.
